A Nurse in Queens Invented Home Security in 1966

US3482037 was filed in 1966 and granted on December 2, 1969. The title is "Home Security System Utilizing Television Surveillance." The named inventors are Marie Van Brittan Brown and Albert L. Brown of Jamaica, Queens, New York.

Marie Brown was a nurse. Her shifts were irregular, often ending late at night, and the neighborhood she lived in had a high crime rate and slow police response times. The specific problem she wanted to solve was narrow and personal: when someone knocked at the door at an odd hour, she had no safe way to see who it was, to speak to them without opening the door, to let in someone she trusted, or to summon help quickly if she needed it. Albert Brown worked in electronics. Together they built a system.

What the patent describes

The system in US3482037 includes, in 1966:

• A motorized camera that could slide vertically between several peepholes set at different heights in the door, so the resident could view a caller whether they were tall, short, or a child.
• A monitor inside the home — a television screen — displaying the camera's feed, so the resident could see the caller from another room.
• A two-way microphone and speaker allowing the resident to talk with the person at the door without opening it.
• A remote-controlled door latch that could be released by the push of a button from inside.
• An emergency panic button that would send an alarm to a security firm or directly to police.

Read that list again and then look at the marketing copy for any modern smart-home security product — a Ring doorbell, a Nest camera, a remote smart lock, a monitored alarm system. Every single element is in the 1966 filing. The Browns described the entire category, as a single integrated system, more than forty years before it became a mass consumer product.

What happened to it

The patent was granted in 1969. It has since been cited as prior art by dozens of later patents — the figure usually given is around thirty-five citations, including by companies working on exactly the closed-circuit and remote-monitoring systems the Browns had outlined. The Browns themselves did not commercialize it at scale; building the system required custom electronics that were expensive in the late 1960s, and the couple did not have the capital or industrial backing to manufacture it.

Marie Van Brittan Brown received an award from the National Scientists Committee and a small amount of press attention at the time. She did not become wealthy or famous from the invention. She died in 1999. The broader recognition — the inclusion in "Black inventors who shaped modern life" features, the acknowledgment that home security as a product category essentially begins with her patent — has arrived mostly in the years since her death.

See the original

The full text and figures of US3482037 are on patents.us.