Guarding your castle against unwanted visitors required a lot of real estate in the Medieval Times.

For many people, building a community home with removable access worked very well.

In the Wild Wild West, campfires, circled wagons and a couple of guards were the preferred (but not always reliable) protection methods.

Then life got more complicated as villages became cities.   Fast forward to the 18^th century, when the first security alarm systems were invented.  People felt safer, but a tripped alarm in the middle of the night could be quite annoying.

Post WWI, a cheaper option was to hire a “door shaker,” a night watchman who would vigorously shake a subscriber’s door each night to make sure it was locked.  This was sometimes scarier than a real burglar!

It took Marie to get us onto the road of modern home video security systems.  In the 1960s, an African-American woman, Marie Van Brittan Brown, invented and patented the first system – with a little help from her engineer husband. She was a nurse who was concerned about her safety when having to work odd hours.Her system included a two-way microphone, remote door locks, and alarm triggers – all part of today’s systems. Marie completely revolutionized home security!

You’ve Come A Long Way Baby!  “Nanny Cams” became popular in the 1990s.  By then, cameras were smaller and technology allowed for higher-resolution surveillance.  Some were virtually undetectable, hidden inside toys and clocks.

Once again women’s use of technology led to a development boom!  Protecting their home was key.  In-home use of digital video cameras soared as home-security companies popped up everywhere.

The only catch was these were definitely not DIY systems.  A truckload of men and equipment arrived to set up your cameras and wires.  The company, not you, monitored the videos.  If there was a YouTube-worthy moment, you would never have known about it, and you’d never see it.  Who knows what they were looking at?