Why “first” is hard to pin down
There is no widely agreed first smart home system. The answer depends on what you count. A house where lights switch on from a wall panel is not quite the same as a house where a computer makes decisions, and neither is the same as a home where devices talk to each other over a network. Different projects reached each of those points at different times, and most were small, experimental or sold to few people.
What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the idea of controlling a home electronically took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, became a consumer product in the late 1970s, and only became common in the 2010s.
Early experiments in the 1960s
Two stories are often told about the 1960s. The first concerns ECHO IV, a home computer project usually credited to a Westinghouse engineer named James Sutherland, built in the mid-1960s. It is described as a machine that could store recipes, keep a household calendar and help control some of the home’s systems. Accounts of how much it actually did vary, and it never became a product, so it is best treated as an interesting prototype rather than a proven first.
The second is a 1969 advertisement for a “kitchen computer” in a department store catalog. It was a novelty offering, with a very high price, and there is no good evidence that anyone bought one or used it. It shows that people could imagine a computer in the kitchen, not that a working smart home existed.
These stories matter because they show the early thinking. Electronic computers at the time filled rooms, so the idea of one running a household was more of a vision than a practical plan.
X10 and control over the power lines
The first widely sold home automation system is generally considered to be X10. It was developed in Scotland in the mid-1970s by a company called Pico Electronics, and products reached the market in the late 1970s. The details of exactly which year and which product counts as its launch differ between sources.
X10’s main trick was to avoid new wiring. Instead of running control cables through walls, it sent short coded pulses along the ordinary electrical wiring of the house. A small controller could send an address and a command, such as “turn on module A3,” and a plug-in module at the matching address would switch a lamp or appliance. Adding the signals at a precise point in the alternating current cycle helped the receivers separate them from background electrical noise.
This design had real strengths. It was inexpensive, it could be installed by an owner without an electrician, and it worked with lamps and other devices already in the house. It also had real weaknesses. Signals could be weakened or lost on noisy or long circuits, commands were one-way in basic products, and there was no confirmation that a device had actually responded. Even so, X10 and similar products were the way most people first experienced home automation, and the standard stayed in use for decades.
Wired systems and the smart house idea
In parallel, builders and electronics companies looked at wiring a house from the start for control. In the 1980s, a U.S. home-building industry group promoted a “smart house” concept, with a shared cabling system for power, signals and communications. Other companies in Europe and Japan worked on their own home bus systems. The terms “smart house” and “intelligent building” were used in the 1980s for these efforts, though exactly who coined them is unclear.
These projects were ambitious but ran into practical problems. Systems from different makers did not work together, installation was expensive in a new house and more so in an old one, and buyers saw little benefit compared with a conventional switch. Standards that would let products from different manufacturers cooperate were slow to arrive. Many of these systems ended up in high-end custom homes, where integrators installed lighting, audio and security under a single control panel.
What the early systems could and could not do
It helps to be specific about what these early systems did.
- Remote switching. Turning lamps and appliances on or off from another room, much like the television remote controls that were spreading at the same period.
- Timers and schedules. Switching things on at set times, for example to make a house look occupied.
- Basic security links. Connecting door sensors and alarms to a central panel.
- Heating control. Adjusting temperatures on a schedule, an area that overlapped with programmable thermostats.
What they could not do was learn habits, respond to the weather, be controlled from far away, or exchange data with the wider world. Those abilities required cheap silicon chips, reliable wireless links and, later, the internet.
What changed later
A few developments moved things from hobbyists to mainstream buyers. Cheap microcontrollers made it practical to put intelligence in each device. Wireless protocols designed for low power, which appeared in the 2000s, removed the need for new wiring. Wi-Fi and the spread of broadband, a story told in the history of the internet, meant that a house already had a network, and smartphones provided a ready-made screen and remote control. Companies then built products around smart home networking, with thermostats, doorbells, locks and lights reachable by app.
Voice control added another layer in the 2010s, and recent industry standards aim to let devices from different makers work together, which is the problem the 1980s projects ran into. How well that works in practice is still debated, and the market remains fragmented.
So what counts as the first?
A fair summary is that several things can be called first depending on the definition:
- an early computer-controlled household concept, such as ECHO IV in the 1960s, if the test is a computer in the home;
- X10, if the test is a mass-market product for controlling devices;
- the smart house projects of the 1980s, if the test is a home designed around integrated control;
- app-controlled, internet-connected devices of the 2010s, if the test is what most people now mean by a smart home.
None of these is wrong, and none is the only valid answer. Because many of these projects are documented mainly through later retellings and company histories, claims of a single first deserve some caution.