Marie Van Brittan Brown
Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash
One of my favorite modern conveniences is my Ring doorbell. I love knowing exactly when my packages arrive, and I really love pretending I’m not home when someone knocks and I’m not in the mood for human interaction. While any introvert out there probably also uses their smart doorbell in this way, we all know the real purpose of technology like this is safety. And long before smart tech and Wi‑Fi, that idea started with a woman whose name most people have never heard: Marie Van Brittan Brown.
In 1966, Marie was a nurse living in Queens who often found herself home alone at odd hours. Police response times were slow, and she didn’t feel safe, so she did what women have always done when the world doesn’t meet their needs; she invented something better.
Marie designed the first home security system: a camera that moved between peepholes, a monitor inside the house, a two‑way microphone, and a remote‑unlocking mechanism. Her design became the foundation for every home‑security system that exists today.
She didn’t have a tech lab.
She didn’t have a startup.
She didn’t have a team of engineers.
She had a problem and the brilliance to solve it.
Yet, like so many women, her name faded into the background while the industry she inspired exploded into a multibillion‑dollar field: "any security system today, be it in homes, business, banks, and public areas, can be traced back to her invention which is cited in 35 US patents." Marie’s story is a reminder that women have always been the architects of safety, innovation, and everyday life. But unless we reclaim these stories, they get rewritten, minimized, or erased.
As we close out Women’s History Month, I keep thinking about how many modern comforts we enjoy because a woman quietly built something extraordinary, and how many of those women never got the credit they deserved.
So here’s to Marie Van Brittan Brown. Here’s to the women who innovate in the margins, to the ones who solve problems no one else sees. And here’s to reclaiming their stories so the next generation grows up knowing exactly what women are capable of.
