Who is Marie Van Brittan, the nurse who invented video surveillance?

Here we are in the New York of the 60s, women are violently attacked in the street or at home. Despite the permanent insecurity that reigns in Queens, the police seem strangely absent, rarely ready to intervene and always late when they agree to move.

Located in a residential area of ​​Jamaica, in Springfield Gardens, the house of Marie Van Brittan Brown and Albert Brown is adjacent to JFK airport, less than a kilometer from the tarmac. They are separated from it only by a series of highways where cars and trucks whiz by in an incessant din. This hubbub of planes landing and taking off, car horns ringing at rush hour is not enough to drown out the sounds of firearms clattering in the distance, the loud voices, and the cries of victims that the gangs leave in their wake.

How did the idea germinate from the peephole to the intercom?

Marie Van Brittan Brown sleeps badly. His work ofnurse leads her to return home exhausted, at all hours of the day and night and her electronics engineer husband is also sometimes led to be absent late and sometimes for several days for interventions. In this empty house surrounded by a hostile world, the slightest noise pulls her from her sleep and keeps her awake for hours. But Marie has no intention of letting fear take over her daily life.

Unable to use her muscles, those of Albert or those of the police, she calls on her brain to develop a solution that will revolutionize homes.

In 1965, with the help of Albert’s electronic talents, Marie Van Brittan Brown devised an ingenious system so that she no longer had to run any risk when answering her gate. Inspired by the relatively recent invention of the peephole, in 1932, she decided to go much further by creating a device that would allow her to see who was in front of her home without having to leave her living room. To do this, she equips her front door with not one but four peepholes offering four different fields of vision, and placed one above the other. Inside, a motorized camera, mounted on rails, slides along the panel of wood to stop at one or other of the peepholes and film what is happening outside.

The image… and the sound

The video signal is then retransmitted to a series of monitors scattered around the house, even in the bedroom where Marie can make sure from the comfort of her bed that no one is trying to insinuate themselves into her home. But his invention does not stop there. Because what if the person standing in front of his door is a complete stranger?

To solve the problem, microphones were also installed at the entrance and on each monitor, giving Marie for the first time the opportunity to exchange directly with her visitor without risking opening the door. Each screen has a series of buttons that will allow the nurse to turn it on, control the position of the camera and activate the microphone at will with a simple gesture. What we would trivially call a intercom or one videophone today is a real revolution for our inventor.

Much more than a gadget intended simply to increase one’s comfort, the system of surveillance that she imagined and designed with her husband is a way for her to regain a sense of security, to gain in autonomy and to fight in its own way against crime which gangrene their neighborhood.

Marie Van Brittan Brown perfects her home security system

For a year, the couple worked tirelessly to perfect their creation and the 1^er August 1966, they submit their invention to the US Patent Office. It will be necessary to wait more than three years so that, on December 2, 1969, the ” home security system using television monitoring », invented by Marie Van Brittan Brown and Albert L. Brown officially receives its patent. And yes, for once, Marie’s name appears above that of her husband throughout the document.

Patent 3,482,037 features several significant improvements over the Browns’ first prototype. First of all, the monitors are now equipped with a button allowing their user to unlock the front door thanks to a signal radio. Another update: conversations can now be recorded by the user of the surveillance system and used in the event of a police intervention. Because yes, Marie intends to push the police to intervene more quickly and more often in Springfield Gardens.

No more unanswered calls, whole minutes spent waiting for someone to pick up the phone. No more officers showing up far too late to do anything useful. Now Albert and Marie’s monitors are equipped with a red button that will directly alert the nearest police station or guard. The latter, they write, will even be able to equip themselves with equipment allowing them to directly receive the video and sound of the whistleblower in order to better assess the urgency of the situation. It will even be used to activate an alarm that will alert the whole neighborhood in Queens.

Barely 4 days after the publication of the patent, the New York Times seizes history and presents for the first time the brilliant invention of Marie Van Brittan Brown. And yet, no one seems to want to invest in the large-scale production of this invention. Even if Marie will receive the prize from the National Science Committee, she will not live long enough to see her invention evolve and spread throughout the world.

Maria and Albert will end up giving up their commercial ambitions and it is only with the miniaturization ever more advanced technologies that their idea will experience a phenomenal expansion to form the basis of a market today estimated at several tens of billions of dollars.

Marie Van Brittan Brown died on February 2, 1999 in Jamaica, at the age of seventy-six. If today his invention is present in every building, shop, hotel or station hall, there is still a long way to go to guarantee everyone the same level of security.