THERE’S A WELL-KNOWN story among surveillance studies scholars and students of Black innovation: that of Marie Van Brittan Brown, a Black woman from Jamaica, Queens, New York who is now recognized as having invented the home security system in 1966. Brown worked long hours as a nurse and often came home late at night. Her husband also worked “irregular hours,” and Brown worried about who might knock on her door if she were home alone at night. Similar versions of Brown’s story can be found at the MIT Lemelson Center and all around the internet, including on Wikipedia, the African American history site Blackpast, and the history site Timeline. It’s understandable that attention would be paid to Brown’s pioneering work as a Black woman inventor whose contribution has rightly been cited in the development of subsequent home security systems and as the origin point for a massive industry.
Brown’s inventor origin story is quite different from that of a similar technology’s creator—Jamie Siminoff, founder of DoorBot, which eventually became the Ring Doorbell. Siminoff started DoorBot in a garage in 2012, after he grew annoyed by people constantly ringing his doorbell. “I was like, how the fuck can there not be a doorbell that goes to your phone?” Siminoff told Digital Trends. As Caroline Haskins wrote in Vice, “DoorBot was thus posed as an answer to a question perhaps only he had ever asked.” Indeed, Brown’s patent is cited in Siminoff’s patent.
Continue reading: https://www.wired.com/story/black-inventor-home-security-system-surveillance/
Brown’s inventor origin story is quite different from that of a similar technology’s creator—Jamie Siminoff, founder of DoorBot, which eventually became the Ring Doorbell. Siminoff started DoorBot in a garage in 2012, after he grew annoyed by people constantly ringing his doorbell. “I was like, how the fuck can there not be a doorbell that goes to your phone?” Siminoff told Digital Trends. As Caroline Haskins wrote in Vice, “DoorBot was thus posed as an answer to a question perhaps only he had ever asked.” Indeed, Brown’s patent is cited in Siminoff’s patent.
Continue reading: https://www.wired.com/story/black-inventor-home-security-system-surveillance/
