Never one to let a fad pass unnoticed, I thought I'd take a peek at those nifty little devices that keep us feeling so warm and cozy. No not electrical fires, but the burglar alarm.
The first electrical alarm was invented by Augustus Pope, an American inventor.The year was 1853. Edwin Holmes bought the patent from him and in 1857 he opened the The Holmes Electric Protective Company. Stories have it that he made skirt hoops in his shop before he got into the protection industry.
With the help of Charles Williams, who knew a few things about telegraphs, and a machinist named Thomas Watson (of Watson, come here I need you fame) they set about keeping the bad guys out of Boston's parlours.
Both Williams and Watson worked on telephone equipment for Alexander Graham Bell and found the work of making alarm systems to be well tied into what they did anyway. In fact Holmes would take advantage of the telephone cabling and switching stations to wire his burglar alarm systems into central dispatch stations. A tripped wire would close a solenoid and ring a bell at a monitoring station where an operator would dispatch the navy to thump the burglar.
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