Marie Van Brittan Brown was the inventor of the first home security system. She is also credited with the invention of the first closed-circuit television. She was born Marie Van Brittan Felton in Manhattan, New York, on December 31, 1928. Her father, Sidney Theodore Felton, was born in North Carolina, and her mother, Lillian Robinson, was from the British West Indies. In 1949, she married Albert Brown in Manhattan. After their marriage, they resided in Queens, New York until her until her death on February 2, 1999, at the age of seventy. The patent for Marie Van Brittan Brown’s invention of the first home security system was filed in 1966, and it later influenced modern home security systems that are still used today. Brown’s invention was inspired by the security risk that her home faced in the neighborhood where she lived. Marie Brown worked as a nurse, and her husband, Albert, worked as an electronics technician. Their work hours were not the standard nine-to-five, and the crime rate in their Queens, New York City, neighborhood was very high. Even when the police were contacted in the event of an emergency, the response time tended to be slow. As a result, … Continue reading Marie Van Brittan Brown (1922-1999)