The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum
Magazine have been running a series of articles on notable consumer
electronics items in history under the banner of "The Consumer
Electronics Hall of Fame".
Brian Santo writes on the development of the ubiquitous battery powered
household smoke detector and the fortuitous discovery that led to the
ionization detector at its heart.
No doubt these $10 gadgets have helped save a countless number of lives.
Story here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-e...rt-smoke-alarm
The magazine of the National Fire Protection Association story and video interview on the early days of the invention :-
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Resear...e-Theres-Smoke
Quote:
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Originally Posted by David A. Lucht, NFPA Magazine
In his memoir, Pearsall writes about the first documented report that a SmokeGard detector had helped save lives in a home fire. It was 1975, and he got a call one morning at his office from Rexford Wilson, whose consulting company was located outside Boston. Wilson started to tell him the story of a Massachusetts family that had just survived a house fire, but Pearsall interrupted him to broadcast the call over the public address system in the Statitrol plant. As workers listened, Wilson told them that he had a burned and shriveled SmokeGard in his office that had been recovered from a house fire two days earlier. The alarm had sounded in the middle of the night, and a family of three, along with their dog, had escaped. The quality control inspector number, 5602, was stamped on the detector, and Wilson congratulated the employee who’d conducted the inspection.
Pearsall offered a few words of gratitude to his employees over the PA system, he writes, and as soon as he finished speaking, “wild applause followed” from the plant.
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