How thermostats were invented in the 19th century
This material is the first in a series of articles dedicated to the “smart home”. In them, we will talk about the first concepts, patents and engineers, thanks to which smart homes have become commonplace today.
There is no need to explain what a “smart home” is. However, even the most brief and touching definition of a “smart home” with its advanced IT vocabulary as “a set of gadgets that automate certain actions in the house” implies the presence of these same devices in the home and thereby completely unreasonably denies our distant ancestors the desire to live in a smart home. But the concept of a “smart home” that appeared thousands of years ago: a dog as an automatic alarm device along the outer perimeter of the house; a cat as a controller of the number of rodents in a cellar with food supplies; a rooster in the hen house as a programmed alarm clock; the stove damper as a key element of climate control inside the house remained relevant at least until the second half of the last century. And somewhere it remains quite functional.
However, historians of the “smart home” silently ignore ancient devices with natural intelligence and begin the history of the smart home with the beginnings of artificial intelligence at the stove damper of the late 19th century, when electricity appeared in the house and, accordingly, the ability to regulate the home microclimate using a thermostat. The thermostat itself has a longer history, which begins at the beginning of the 17th century with the invention of Cornelius Drebbel, who served as the court mechanical engineer of the English King James I (there was such a title in the history of engineering – life mechanic). In Drebbel's thermostat, the increased pressure of heated air and alcohol vapor raised the mercury in the U-shaped tube, which pushed the rod, which closed the damper, blocking the access of air to the fire, and the fire went out.
By and large, the thermostats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had the same operating principle, only an increase in temperature closed the electrical contact in one way or another, and then the mechanical work of regulating the temperature was carried out by various, sometimes fanciful, electromechanical tricks. There were many patents for these tricks. If anyone is interested, you can look through the brochure “Electric Heat Regulator” on the Internet. The First 100 Years” (“Electrical thermoregulation. The first 100 years”), published in 1985 by Honeywell Inc., which had already become one of the world leaders in the market of electronic control and automation systems. It lists the 10 most prolific inventors of thermostat variations before the era of household electricity and the 10 equally prolific inventors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with their key patents. But usually only two of them appear in reviews of the history of the “smart home”. Why exactly they are will become clear a little later.
The first of them is Professor Warren Johnson from Whitewater, Wisconsin. The town is still small, about 15 thousand inhabitants, but then 3.5 thousand people lived in it, there was an elementary school and what we now call a teacher training college (now a local branch of the University of Wisconsin). Professor Johnson was in charge of all education at Whitewater. The common story of his invention is that a professor teaching at the school was irritated by the different temperatures in the classrooms: some were too hot, others were too cold. And out of frustration, he invented the bimetallic spiral thermostat (US Patent No.281884 on the “Electric Tele-Thermoscope”, priority dated July 1883), which monitored the temperature in the classrooms and signaled the school's stoker in the basement to open or close the heating damper and open the windows to ventilate overheated classrooms.
No matter how funny it looks, it is quite possible that everything happened exactly like this or something like this. A patent is just paper with a stamp, and in a fairly decent-sized building, where numerous rooms are maintained at optimal temperatures thanks to thermostats, it was possible to invite William Plankinton, heir to his father’s million-dollar fortune, who became rich during the Civil War by supplying meat to the Northern army. From Milwaukee to Whitewater there are only 45 miles, and the Milwaukee Meat Packing Partnership of Plankinton Sr. very actively invested its capital in banks, railroads, and built a hotel in Milwaukee, the largest building in the city.
But be that as it may, the Plankinton Bank in Milwaukee opened a line of credit to Professor Johnson, and he, parting with his professorship at Whitewater, established the Johnson Electric Service Co. in Milwaukee in 1885. and began to work closely on home thermoregulation. He received a key patent for a fully automatic “Temperature Regulating Apparatus” in July 1895 (U.S. Patent No.542733 with priority from June 1894). In his patent application, Warren Johnson wrote without any sense of false modesty: “Over the past ten years, I have received many patents related to temperature control. My present invention is the result of many years of experience and its purpose is to create a device that will provide the advantages of previous devices of its class, but which can be manufactured and maintained at a lower cost.” In total, from 1883 until his death in 1911, he received more than fifty patents, and his company became one of the leaders in the home heating systems market. Now Johnson Controls International is an international corporation that produces fire protection equipment, air conditioning and security systems for buildings and is listed at the bottom of the fourth hundred in the Fortune Global 500 world rankings of the richest publicly traded companies. In general, Mr. Johnson's business is thriving.
Almost simultaneously with Professor Johnson, the inventor from Minneapolis, Albert Butz, became interested in automatic control of the home microclimate. More precisely, at first he decided to adapt the thermostat to an automatic fire warning system, and in addition to it he also proposed rather original fire extinguishers in the form of glass grenades with carbon tetrachloride (carbon tetrachloride, essentially freon). They had to be thrown into the flame; carbon tetrachloride reduced its temperature and oxygen content in it. Since the 1930s, it has been widely used in fire extinguishers and was banned by the Montreal Protocol only in the late 1980s, during another bout of concern for the Earth's ozone layer.
Butz's fire-fighting initiative was financed by Minneapolis banker Richard Mendenhall, and they even established a company in advance for the future production of “Butz-Mendelhall hand grenade fire extinguishers.” How did it happen that instead of all this, Albert Butz, in December 1885, filed an application for the invention of the “Thermoelectric Damper” (US Patent No.341092 dated May 4, 1886) and again began to look in advance for new investors willing to give money for its industrial production; now it is impossible to say for sure. Some say that the banker Mendenhall himself advised him to do this, who never received hand grenades named after him. Others believe that the inventor's patent attorneys insisted on this. But be that as it may, investors were found, and on April 23, 1886, that is, 12 days before the US Patent Office approved Butz’s title of protection, the Butz Thermoelectric Regulator Company was registered.
What happened next was even more interesting. Butz's company never brought anything to market, and two years later, in 1888, inventor Albert Butz transferred the rights to his patents to his patent attorneys and left Minneapolis for Chicago. Butz's patent lawyers themselves registered the Consolidated Temperature Controlling Company, then in 1892 renamed it the Electric Thermostat Company and in the same 1892 sold their rights to Butz's patents for $1 to William Sweatt, who manufactured wooden wheelbarrows and kiosks for street vendors in Minneapolis. Probably, the terms of the deal still included the payment of royalties to Alberta Butz, because he, having left Minneapolis, continued to patent improvements to his system for automatically monitoring the temperature in the house, and in total since 1886 he received 12 patents, the last one in 1909 , 4 years after his death (it was handed over to his heirs). And Sweatt once again renamed the company the Electric Heating Regulator Company, and in 1895 it began to make a profit.
Subsequently, his company merged with the company of Mark Honeywell and was completely absorbed by the latter. Now Honeywell International Inc. occupies 115th place in the Fortune Global 500 ranking already mentioned above. And due to the fact that the history of these two modern industrial giants – Johnson Controls International and Honeywell International Inc. – began with the inventions of Warren Johnson and Albert Butz, it was their inventions that migrated into textbook prehistory ” smart home.” For historians of the “smart home” this is convenient; there is no need to delve into the archives of not yet digitized patents of the late 19th century and look for who really was the first, when you can simply borrow the necessary apocrypha from the great mythology of big business and attach them to your history.
Concluding the early history of home climate control, it is probably necessary to recall that the patents of Warren Johnson and Albert Butz and all their contemporaries, inventors of automation for home microclimate, including the first electric dew point thermostats and differential hygrostats, dealt with the regulation of stove heating, that is about the stove damper in the literal sense. One of the “smart home” historians figuratively described the essence of the invention of the automated spring stove damper by Alberta Butz: “It looks remarkably like a cat door damper, which rises when it gets cold, allowing the stove to burn more intensely, and lowers again when it gets warmer.” ” There was no mass steam heating in America at that time; it appeared only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Mark Honeywell’s company was at its origins.
It is also interesting that in the 20th century, as automatic thermostats developed, the leadership of the Institution of Heating and Ventilation Engineers (IHVE), an association of industrialists in this field, grew prejudice against automatic home climate control, saying that it was unreliable and could fail. The situation changed radically only in our century, when the “iPhone” appeared among thermostats – a fully interactive thermostat with touch screen technology, and then control of the home climate completely moved to a real smartphone.
That, in fact, is all that concerns early control of the home microclimate. In principle, the prehistory of the “smart home” could begin with residential lighting control systems, starting with the invention of the electric switch in the same 1880s. Here's your choice of British Patent No. 3256 dated September 25, 1884 by John Holmes or US Patent No.305310 dated September 16 of the same 1884 by Thomas Bryant. Or better yet, with the invention of the Safe Household Dimmer (U.S. Patent No.569443 dated October 13, 1896) by African American Granville Woods. Woods is often called America's first black electrical engineer and the author of fifty inventions. But it is not so. He had 26 patents, and there were 24 African American inventors in New York State alone in the 19th century, including one African American woman. Woods stands out from all of them only in that Edison lost his patent litigation twice and then invited Woods to his company. He refused.
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