Saturday, December 21, 2013

Innovation: Who Made That Smoke Alarm?

Jens Mortensen for The New York TimesIn the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a “static neutralizer” — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he’d just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. “You have no way of knowing whether it’s operational unless you set fire to your house,” wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. “Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test.”

You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they’re working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. “You’d hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep,” says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. “Then the family comedy would ensue.” In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the “unloved object” in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we’re being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. “You’re like, ‘I’m just burning the toast!’ ” Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, “ ‘Hey honey, I smell something,’ ” he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, “Heads up!” in a woman’s voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, “Honey, I got this.” The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: “When it glows green, it’s saying, ‘Everything’s working just fine.’ If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, ‘Batteries are low,’ ” according to Fadell.

But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.

AIR-QUALITY CONTROL

Mark Belinsky invented a “smart air monitor” called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.

How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.

You’ve designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it’s there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what’s in your house, but also what’s in the neighborhood and your city.

And how’s your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.

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