The history of home automation goes back longer than most people might guess. It goes past the 2000s, beyond the bright and bold 80s, right back to the end of the 19th century.
1890 – Individual appliance automation
The introduction of domestic electric power distribution allowed for the creation of automatic home appliances such as washing machines, refrigerators, and dishwashers. The first widely recognised among these automated devices was the automatic water storage heater, patented in 1890. This appliance automatically controlled the temperature of a household’s water using a temperature-controlled gas valve, and later a timer to allow the heating to be scheduled.
Needless to say, this and the rest of the flurry of automated appliances that were invented over the next 30 years changed homes and home lives throughout the developed world forever. They cut hours off the average day’s chores, making millions of lives more comfortable and luxurious, just as integrated smart homes are today. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
1960s – Smart commercial buildings
The first smart commercial buildings were seen in the mid-60s, using electrical currents to communicate issues, needs and errors around large buildings. This saved time in the increasingly large buildings and improved efficiency within the ever-growing organisations that inhabited them. By the end of the decade, major commercial buildings like the New York Stock Exchange had installed computers at the hub of their automated networks. This allowed once slow and inhibitive data processes to be carried out in fractions of a second. This in turn allowed the number of shares traded to jump from one billion in 1960 to over three billion in 1970*.
* https://www.nyse.com/history-of-nyse (15-10-2024)
1975 – The birth of smart home integration - X10
By the early-70s, building automation networks and processing computers were becoming commonplace in commerce and major industrial buildings. Thomas Watson's prediction that “there is a world market for maybe five computers” and no more had been proven well and truly wrong. This was largely done by IBM, the company he once chaired.
In the same decade, Pico Electronics, of Glenrothes, Scotland, brought another incredibly inaccurate prediction up to date. By creating the first single-chip computer and calculator, they helped to show that "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.", as Popular Mechanics magazine had predicted. They also created the foundation for X-10, a set of modules and a standard for automating lamps and other home appliances.
The X10 modules used single-chip computers to control the appliances plugged into them based on time and remote switching. They transmitted digital data via the household electrical wiring that powered the appliances. This innovation positioned Pico and X10 as pioneers and leaders in the home automation industry for over a decade. Their standard was used across Europe and in the US.
1999 – Foundation of the KNX organisation and standard
By the late 90s, there were significant numbers of businesses working in the home automation market, from megacorps like Siemens to specialists like Jung and Berker. This was all very good for customers, but an independent standard was needed to ensure that appliances from different manufacturers could work and network together. Anyone who has tried to work seamlessly across Apple tech and Windows software, or literally anything else, knows how critical this is.
Although a few such standards existed in the late 90s, none of them were definitive and few were independent and open. This changed when EHS, EIB and BatiBUS combined together to form the KNX organisation and administer the global KNX standard. This meant that with some training, integrators like us could quickly and effectively network and combine many different smart home technologies. In turn, this made home automation easier, quicker and more seamless for customers.
This set the stage for a global home automation revolution. All that was needed was one more innovation …
2000s – Wireless communication and appliance control
Throughout the history of home automation until the new millennium, one of the main obstacles holding back the smart home evolution was the lack of effective wireless communication and control. This all changed when standard wireless internet protocols and devices were adopted globally throughout the 2000s.
Twentieth-century home automation offerings like X10 and early EIB/KNX often used radio and other EM waves. They often relied on the devices electronic carrier wires to broadcast radio signals within the home. Anyone who has chatted on citizen band radio will know how easy it is for personally broadcast signals such as these to be interrupted. This was a major problem when appliances like your oven or security systems depended on them.
Against this background, the global adoption of wireless through the noughties changed home automation forever. While many of us were enjoying surfing the web from our bed and streaming to our iPods at the coffee shop, smart home creators were incorporating Wi-Fi into their services to great effect.
Wi-Fi meant that devices in the home could communicate with central hubs and each other reliably and consistently. This turned automated smart homes from an awkward, unreliable technical quirk into a revolutionary technology that had the potential to change our home lives. It would not be long until home automation sales really took off in the new millennium.
2011 – 2016 – Voice assistants and smart speakers become widespread
On February the 18th 2011, IBM’s supercomputer - Watson won the human response prediction game, Jeopardy against the two leading champions. Watson used speech recognition and cognitive prediction technology to win the popular gameshow, which is especially difficult for machines to succeed in. These abilities for machines to recognise speech and predict what a person thinks, and wants gave rise to a new generation of voice assistants that would become central to smart homes.
In April of the same year, Apple introduced Siri, which would begin life on the company’s phones and eventually transition to Siri Home in 2016. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana followed in 2012 and 2013 respectively. These were followed by Amazon Alexa and Echo in November 2014.
While the previous products had set the stage for Smart Home Hubs, Amazon’s Alexa and Echo were the first items that brought the potential for this advance into many peoples’ houses.
2014 – 2024 – The home automation explosion
Try to think back: How long can you remember terms like ‘home automation’ and ‘smart home’ being around for? Ten years. Maybe 15, if you are in the home automation loop. That’s because these are the years in the history of home automation in which the idea exploded into the popular consciousness and the market.
In the mid-2010s, everything was in place for the biggest leap forward in the history of home automation to begin. Wi-Fi had done away with the awkward electrical signals and radio waves, and standardisation had made inter-brand integration effective. Meanwhile, open-source adaptation has made it possible to redesign smart home software to serve customers individually.
Still, in 2014 the global smart tech market was worth a relatively small $11 billion. This was just the beginning of the boom. In the next three years, the market would almost quadruple in size to $42 billion in 2017, before quadrupling again to $160 billion in 2024. This shows the potential of a burgeoning industry, the value of which is forecast to reach $223 billion by 2027.
