Home/burglar alarms had their beginnings in the United States more than 150 years ago when Augustus Pope of Somerville, Massachusetts, devised a system of protecting doors and windows using magnetic switches or contacts. Wired to a battery and a bell, the switches closed if an intruder opened one of the doors or windows. This set off the bell that was usually located in the bedroom, awakening the home owner.

This invention earned Pope a patent for an "improvement in electro-magnetic alarms" in 1853 but the alarm did not make any significant progress until Pope sold the patent four years later to Edwin Holmes, who manufactured hooped skirts and owned a notions and sewing supplies business in Boston. With help from contacts in the developing electrical industry, as well as his own ingenuity, Holmes refined and developed the burglar alarm. He installed his first electric home/burglar alarm system in 1858 but sales in Boston were slower than he liked. Showing further resourcefulness he moved his business to New York where he believed the higher crime rate would result in more demand for his product.

Even the worldly-wise New Yorkers at first found it a difficult concept. The idea that the opening of a door or window on the floor below could set off an alarm in an upstairs room challenged credibility. As astute with sales talk as he was with inventions, Holmes brought the product to the people and showed them how it could work by building a model house in which he installed a working alarm system so that people could see demonstrations of the system in action.

Determined to spread the word as widely as possible he also went on a selective door knocking sales expedition, targeting the wealthiest homes in New York. After some persuasive talking to the owners of these homes, who had the most to lose and the money to buy the means of preventing that loss, Holmes found interest growing. The money soon began rolling in.

The increasing income meant Holmes could afford to carry out continual improvements to the systems. Some of these improvements are still features of burglar alarm systems in use today. They included a clock to enable and disable the alarm system at certain times, switches to control the house lights and annunciators with colored tags that indicated the status of each door and window. Holmes also created a storage cabinet for valuables. Current-carrying foil lined the cabinet, and detector switches were built into its door.

Two other inventions in the 1870s made significant contributions towards the increasingly sophisticated ways in which burglar alarms could be used. Thomas Edison’s improvements to the telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone both represented developments that were utilized in the setting up of a central monitoring system in New York through which the location of alarm signals could be identified quickly. As populations grew and cities increased in size, such monitoring systems became increasingly regarded as essential to ensure a quick response to alarms in homes and businesses. The Holmes Central Monitoring Station was set up as the first customer of the telephone, and Holmes became the inaugural president of the Bell Telephone Company of New York. Holmes company employees included Thomas Watson, who had worked with Bell on the invention of the telephone, and Holmes’ son, Edwin T Holmes, who later took over the company.

New alarm systems continued to come into use, each one considered more advanced and complex than its predecessors. They included intricate arrangements of conductive lead foil to protect windows, the use of magnetic/mechanical switches for doors that were also laced with wire and almost-invisible trip wire to catch and trap the unwary. Each alarm circuit had its own direct wire to the central office, necessitating the construction of the first Holmes monitoring station on the top floor of a New York city building to accommodate the thousands of direct wires that darkened the sky as they converged on the station.

It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that alarm sensors and controls entered the electronics era. Advances during the 1970s resulted in such innovations as microwave and ultrasonic motion sensors as well as alarm controls with entrance and exit delays. Digital dialers and passive infrared motion detectors also developed in the 1970s and are still widely used today. The increased combination of automation with alarm controls is another recent development, with home networks now able to incorporate communications, entertainment, security, convenience and information systems. Special wiring enables the remote control and programming by home owners of many automated home electronic devices, including the security system. Sensor, control and communication technology continues to advance, with the Internet also creating new opportunities for manufacturers and consumers of home burglar alarms.
 
All the many advances have brought the humble burglar alarm a long way since its beginnings in the creative hands of Augustus Pope and Edwin Holmes more than one and a half centuries ago.