Take one.
Shall we?
Take a minute.
Look around you.
You probably never think about it,
but we are living in a time of incredible ingenuity.
Our lives are filled with fiendishly clever bits of tech
that basically make the modern world tick.
The problem is, we're now so used to these devices
that we have forgotten to remember how clever they are.
SPEAKER: I don't have an answer for that.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry,
your hammer-wielding,
tech curious tour guide
to the secret genius of everyday objects.
There is one law of physics that you need to know.
In each episode...
Whoa!
..I will take one seemingly ordinary item...
Oh! Immediately smoking.
..and I'll look at it in frankly...
Yeah!
..obscene detail...
Two googly eyes.
It has 180 degree view.
..meet the people who helped make it...
This is the very first air fryer.
..and follow the twisty, turny journey through the history
of its invention.
If you overshoot the turning point, don't try to do this.
It's wobbly, Johnny.
Yeah, it's just wind.
Warm up your fingers, folks.
This time, it's the doorbell.
Yes?
But this isn't just any old standard ding-dong.
This is a marvel of modern technology.
The smart doorbell.
And if you're as addicted to online shopping as I am,
it means you can keep an eye on your postie
wherever you are in the world,
and keep an eye out for intruders.
This all-seeing device is taking over our doorsteps.
But how did a garage tinkerer, who hit the jackpot...
In 2018, sold to Amazon for $1 billion.
..some Soviet spy tech...
Are you sure you haven't just made a sort of futuristic disco ball?
..and a student desperate for a drink...
We did not think this was a big deal at the time.
We just were having fun and we were thirsty.
..create the technological phenomenon
that is the smart doorbell?
In the UK, a package gets delivered over 100 times a second.
That is a lot of ding-dongs.
Whether it's Nest, Blink or Arlo,
millions of us have hooked up our homes with a smart doorbell
so we can see, hear
and speak to people...
Hey, can you chuck it over the wall?
..without even going to the door.
Yeah, it'll be fine, I think it's a pair of socks.
And there is no bigger smart doorbell company than Ring.
Last year, they sold an estimated 2.5 million doorbells worldwide.
So I've come to their LA headquarters, where today,
I'm meeting someone very exciting.
Oh, my God, did you actually build a fake human and put heat coils
in it to test it?
Yeah. That's prime time.
Well, for a science nerd like me anyway.
Meet Dave Ward, tester of hot fake humans
and one of the company's earliest employees.
Did people think you were crazy or were people
on board straight away?
Yeah, I mean, rewind, it's 2012.
The idea of being able to see what was happening at your doorbell
just didn't really exist.
And that was really the invention.
There is blood, sweat and tears in every one of these.
What we've managed to cram into something so small
is really quite fascinating.
Inside your smart doorbell is a complex array of components,
from the motion sensor to the chime.
But let's start with the bit that gives us a virtual window
into the world outside our front doors.
It's the camera.
Welcome to my workshop,
an all-American garage.
Basically a temple to tinkering and taking stuff apart.
Right, now, the main part of this that makes it a smart
doorbell is the camera.
So let's get inside this little guy.
That's the cover.
That bit... Oh, and the battery.
So here is the little camera right there.
Really teeny tiny, cute little thing.
Now, OK, this doorbell has to work
whether your front door happens to be in sunny California
or in grey, overcast Glasgow.
To see if this camera really can cope with whatever's thrown at it...
Just doing a connection here.
..I want to compare my doorbell cam...
OK, here we go.
Oh, God, that wasn't a good view.
..to Emma our producer's fancy-schmancy broadcast cam.
If I come out here into the sunshine,
this is not perfectly exposed, perfectly exposed, perfectly
exposed, straight into the sunshine.
I mean, my eyes haven't even adjusted yet.
And yet this camera is still capturing all of me
in that extremely bright light.
Come over here. Come here.
Look straight into the sun. Thank you.
How's that?
Looks like that's 1-0 to this particular doorbell.
Although the overexposure does give me a rather
flattering angelic glow.
The other thing that you'll notice with this one is that actually,
it doesn't matter how far away I am or close up,
the focus is very good.
Let me try that with you.
Oh!
To be fair, these cameras are built for different jobs.
Plus, nobody looks good that close up.
Apart from maybe Scarlett Johansson.
But clearly, this tiny tech punches above its weight.
Time to find out how a camera with no operator
gets to be so clever.
So this is me yesterday, taking my dog for a walk.
Your street looks well nice.
I live across the street from Gwen Stefani's brother.
That is Gwen Stefani's brother's neighbour
and Ring camera guru, Elaine Smith.
You can't change where this is placed, right,
because this is fixed to a wall or to a door frame, and we've got
to deal with whatever that condition is.
There's a lot that goes into making sure that every part of the image
is actually in focus and clear for you to see.
When you see a person walking by, what you're going to see
is that person in focus every step of the way.
You're still going to see that tree in the background, that great depth
perception and detail in that image from our cameras
versus what you're going to see from a traditional camera
that's looking for that focus point
and making everything else blur in the background.
It's the super wide angle lens that makes almost everything
in the scene in focus.
And it often gets pushed to the limit.
We've got to solve for rain and hail and spiders and spider webs.
Spiders' webs? Yeah.
I mean, spider webs are definitely a big problem for us.
Spiders seem to love our products for some reason.
When you've got something that close to the lens, you've got to adjust
for the rest of the scene.
Do you have, like, a spider web mode?
No, we probably need to develop that!
The other challenges with the remote camera
are the changing light conditions it has to deal with
24/7, day or night.
We can go all the way down to what we call 0.35 lux,
which is like a sliver of a moon in the sky.
A sliver of a moon in the sky.
You'll have full true colour night-vision.
How do you actually do it, though?
You have to have the right sensor.
We have quite a large sensor that we're using now to take in
as much light as possible in that low light situation.
The camera sensor is the bit that takes in light
via millions of tiny solar cells,
which is then converted into the digital image.
The bigger the sensor, the more light it can take in.
Your sensor is sensitive enough that you can actually get colour
even from that little amount of light?
Yes. Amazing.
Camera technology is now so good, it can record
incredible images without anyone even operating it.
But where did the idea of an always on,
24/7 remote camera come from?
Well, it all started with a man and a horse.
In the 1870s,
photographer Eadweard Muybridge was tasked with proving
that during the gallop, a horse lifts all four hooves
off the ground, something too fast for the naked eye to see.
By taking 12 successive photos, he was able to create
the first moving image.
And then in 1888, a certain Thomas Edison asked his assistant,
William Dickson, to find a more efficient way
to record movement.
Dickson produced the Kinetoscope, a kind of early peep show box.
This is the original Edison Kinetoscope, in which the audience,
one at a time, viewed the picture through a peephole.
Film was passed between a lens and a flickering light to create
the illusion of motion.
By the 1920s, the race was on to create smaller tech
that could broadcast live images,
something that would later become known as television.
One of those inventors in the race was genius Russian musical maverick,
Leon Theremin, best known for his frankly bonkers musical instrument.
Just like a crying cat!
WARBLING SOUNDS
Today I'm meeting Neil Smith,
tech expert and theremin enthusiast.
I mean, he's like, he's the most unbelievable character.
He was certainly out of the ordinary.
Sort of a young prodigy.
It's the 1920s, and young Leon has caught the eye of his university
physics lecturer, Abram Ioffe,
who sets him the challenge of making a television system.
OK, now, I think you have to imagine this in the context
of the time, right? Yes.
Because television wasn't even really a thing.
There were people in many countries working on some sort of television
system for broadcast.
He read patents, and he picked up on all of the ideas
that had been tried and failed.
Armed with all this research, Leon invents a ground-breaking camera
system that he calls Distant Vision,
and which Neil is in the midst of trying to recreate himself.
You sure you haven't just made a sort of futuristic disco ball?
With over 300 individually hand machined parts,
it's been a labour of love for Neil.
Do you know what? You are, and I mean this
in the most complimentary way possible,
the biggest nerd I've ever met!
I absolutely love it.
Building this was no small feat.
No images of the inside workings of Leon's machine exist,
as they were made secret by the Kremlin.
More on that later.
Talk me through it. OK. What on earth is going on?
So this is the camera element.
And what happens here is, if you imagine there's a scene
over there, the light from that scene comes in,
reflects off these mirrors, and then it reflects off that mirror,
and then it goes down to a photo sensor inside that tube.
This one here? Yep.
Leon's invention has two spinning mirror drums that work together
to receive light and scan it across a tiny window
in front of the photocell light detector -
his version of the smart doorbell's camera sensor.
Then a radio transmitter sends the image to somewhere else.
In other words, transmits it.
And because it's an electrical signal, it's nearly instantaneous.
Even if you're ten miles away, you see it in real time.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
Essentially, Leon had created live TV.
So this was like one of the first times ever, ever that,
like, an image has been translated from one place to another
without the process of, like, chemically changing film?
Remarkable. Really remarkable.
Neil's magnificent model isn't quite at live demo stage yet,
but this is what Leon's moving images would have looked like.
That's 100 lines of resolution, which might not look impressive
compared to the 2,000 plus lines of our modern TVs,
but it was revolutionary for its time.
News of Leon's invention travelled all the way to the Kremlin.
He was asked to do a demonstration, so he took one of his units
and being flash, he put it on a tripod outside in the courtyard
with a telephoto lens, and it was looking at the people
that were coming up to this office.
Which unsurprisingly piqued the interest
of a rather important man, Joseph Stalin.
You know, the dictator running the Soviet Union.
Stalin liked it so much that he said,
"Let's pay him some money
"and tell him never to talk about it ever again.
"And we'll use it for...purposes."
Kremlin purposes? Mm-hm.
It disappears from the public record.
It's gone.
What do you think happened?
From what I've heard, it was used for all the things that you would
use a CCTV system for.
Leon had inadvertently invented a security system/spying tool
and given it to one of the most dangerous men on the planet.
It really was the cutting edge.
But thus began a century of surveillance?
Absolutely. And maybe more?
And maybe more.
As the Kremlin put the kibosh on Leon's TV tech,
the man who got all the glory with his rival system in 1926
was John Logie Baird, crowned the father of television,
just to rub it in.
And over the next few decades, the technology really took off.
And here it is,
the greatest advance in television,
so beautiful, it enhances any decor.
Although not everyone approved.
Well, I think it'll have a fairly detrimental effect
on the knitting industry.
With TV came the rise of a very different type
of live broadcast, one more aligned with the way
Stalin allegedly used Leon's original device.
Footage transmitted on a private system,
otherwise known as CCTV.
Here, one man watches all the major intersections of the city.
Phasing the traffic lights to fit the volume of vehicles
throughout the day.
By the 1960s, closed circuit TV surveillance was being used
for everything from catching railway vandals to Thai royal visits.
And by the 2000s, CCTV was in cities across the world.
Eventually the tech became so cheap and simple,
we started to use it to monitor our homes.
But it wasn't until 2011 that a frustrated inventor would find
an entirely new use for CCTV.
The camera doorbell.
So whenever anyone asks what I do, or customs forms,
when I go into countries, I always just put, "Inventor."
And it's very funny because the customs agent, you know,
they'll usually look back and then they'll say, like, "What?"
And now I say, I invented Ring, and they're like, "Holy shit!"
I'm like, "Yeah."
That's right. Meet Jamie Siminoff.
The Ring doorbell all began as an idea in his head
from a garage much like this one.
I was a tinkerer, like, I've always had a garage or a basement.
Everything I look at, I'm always trying
to see how I can make it better.
Hidden away, creating,
Jamie kept missing deliveries as he couldn't hear his doorbell.
I'm like, "Oh, there must be someone making a Wi-Fi video doorbell
"or even like a Wi-Fi doorbell," and just nothing existed.
Obviously, there was only one solution, to create a doorbell
that was also a camera, which he called the Doorbot.
And so literally the first Doorbot that I built,
I mean, this is the manufactured version.
I literally built it, soldered it, you know, hammered it out
on my bench on nights and weekends.
It's like I built this stupid thing
and I put it on the front of my house.
The missed delivery problem was solved, but he soon realised
there was an even bigger upside to seeing who was at the door.
My wife is like, "Oh, this makes me feel safer at home."
I invented a different way to do home security and no-one
had ever done that.
His ingenuity caught the eye of producers on one of the biggest
TV shows in America.
I get a call from a random number, pick it up.
The guy's like,
"That thing's awesome, you've got to be on Shark Tank."
OK. I'm like, "We're gonna be on Shark Tank," at home.
Like, "We're gonna be on Shark Tank!"
Shark Tank is quite a lot like our Dragons' Den.
But being American with bigger teeth, bigger budgets,
and a much nastier bite.
I was going to win.
I worked really hard at doing that.
And I was, yeah, I was going to win Shark Tank.
Here, the small fry live in constant terror
of the larger denizens of the deep.
Unfortunately, his confidence was slightly misplaced.
And then in the first, like, five minutes, Mark Cuban's like,
"Jamie, great idea. Can't see it getting that big.
"I need big things. I'm out."
I'm like...
So I thought Mark Cuban was, like, for sure going to invest.
They just were like, "How much does a regular doorbell cost?
"OK, well, yours is 200 bucks.
"Well, a regular doorbell can't be $20 and yours is 200.
"How big is the doorbell market?
"How many doorbells are sold a year?" Well, not that many.
"Well, then you can only sell a percentage
"of not that many."
Or as they say on Dragons' Den...
I'm out. I'm afraid I'm out.
I'm out.
I walked out of there just like, I was just like,
I almost, like, blacked out.
But when the show finally aired, people loved the Doorbot.
So this was like a legit big show, 13 minute TV commercial on us.
And so being on Shark Tank was almost like a stamp of approval.
And we immediately saw that people want this product.
We became, I think it's one of the fastest growing
hardware companies in history.
Some might say they'd hit the jackpot.
So we did Shark Tank and then we launched Ring at the end of that.
That was three million.
The next year was 30 million, the next year was 170,
the next year was 480.
And it didn't stop there.
In 2018, early 2018, sold to Amazon for $1 billion.
Not bad for a garage tinkerer.
By adding a camera, Jamie had turned a simple doorbell
into a whole new form of home security.
Our next component is the part of your doorbell that gets to work
before the camera has even woken up.
It's the clever tech that can detect within milliseconds when there's
someone or something at the door.
It's the motion sensors.
Motion detection just gives you that next level of security.
I'm back with doorbell don Dave Ward at Ring HQ
to find out about the first line of doorbell defence.
This motion sensor, then, is the only point of it to be able
to tell that there's an intruder coming? No.
One of the big things is battery.
The camera is the biggest drain on the battery, so they only want it
to turn on when absolutely necessary.
We're deciding whether we should wake the device up.
So we start with passive infrared.
So that's a sensor.
And it's allowing us to detect the movement of heat.
Do you mean to say that you're triggering the doorbell
via your body heat? Absolutely.
As you walk towards that, we're detecting that heat signal.
To cover a full 180 degree field of view,
the doorbell has not one but two passive infrared sensors.
Time for my favourite hot fake human.
So one of the things that we wanted to be able to do is to be able
to test the device as we were having it in an environment.
So we created a humanoid that moves across an environment,
which is great.
So, a moving person or a replica of a moving person.
And because they're not real humans, they can be subjected
to all conditions and work all the hours.
Is that just to stop some poor soul having to walk backwards
and forwards in front of a camera?
You need to do it more than once, I can tell you that. Really?
Thousands and thousands and thousands of times.
But the problem with passive infrared is that many things
can give off heat, like a raccoon
or even a car.
Your car is rolling away.
So to stop the camera being woken up by these false alarms,
there's another way to make sure it's a human.
So radar gives us now depth, so we can understand... Mm!
..not only the fact that we've now got human shape in there,
but we can see whether it's coming towards us,
whether it's moving away from us, maybe it's behind something.
CAT PURRS
If I wanted to rob someone's home...
I hope you don't, by the way. HANNAH LAUGHS
I don't. I mean, I'm six foot tall and ginger, you know what I mean?
I'd get spotted a mile away. Well, you know.
OK, let's say... Yeah? ..could I coat myself in ice packs
HANNAH LAUGHS
..and then maybe hide
behind, I don't know, a tree cut out and approach the door?
Would it set off the sensor? It would still set the sensor off.
I guess I'm more suited to science than a life of crime.
Infrared and radar are pretty good at sorting the hedgehogs
from the humans...
LAUGHTER
..but there is a third fail-safe - image detection using AI.
LAUGHTER
An algorithm runs to give us object classification,
so we've got a model that identifies the difference between a human
and other objects. And a leaf. And a leaf.
Are you getting any false positives now? Absolutely. Absolutely we do.
A human from a distance, slightly different.
Maybe it's similar to an animal, for instance,
depending on the angle it looks at.
So you've got these three different sensors - the heat detection,
the radar depth detection and then the image detection. Absolutely.
And none of those are perfect but, put together, they work really well.
Three imperfect things create a great experience
is the best way to describe it.
To understand exactly how these smart doorbells
manage to use heat to detect movement,
I've got my tools out again.
In here, this is where all the detection happens.
This little frog-shaped guy right in there.
And you'll notice that he has two googly eyes
pointing off in slightly different directions. That's deliberate.
That's to make sure that it has a 180 degree view.
Froggy's googly eyes are actually our passive infrared sensors,
or PIR.
The hotter something is, the more infrared radiation is emitted,
which I'm able to demonstrate with this handy infrared camera.
You can see that I'm very hot and sweaty
in this Californian garage with no air-con.
Now, this is essentially just a fancy version
of what's going in here.
But what is it that's allowing the googly eyes to detect heat?
It's this very special substance called PZT,
or lead zirconate titanate.
Tiny pieces of PZT are hidden inside these motion detectors.
Just a little, little bit of it just there.
That little band of it.
When PZT absorbs the infrared radiation from a warm object
like a person, this material changes temperature,
creating tiny atomic movements within it -
enough to generate a small electrical voltage.
It's got a battery, just to add some juice to the system,
and then this little disc of PZT over here,
which should detect a temperature change.
So if I pop this little...
Ooh!
HANNAH CHUCKLES
The heat from the flame...
..is changing the temperature of this substance,
which in turn causes just this slight little change
to the electrical current - just enough that it can be detected
by this circuit to turn that little light on.
You can see it with the lighter.
That is quite satisfying, isn't it?
This thing is so sensitive that it can detect a temperature change
as small as one millionth of a degree.
Ooh, I can do it with my finger as well. Look at that.
These tiny pieces of PZT in my doorbell's motion sensors
pick up the teeny changes in temperature
from up to nine metres away and alerts my doorbell.
Oh, I think I might have melted everything.
Which is why I was only allowed inside the garage
and not in the house.
All motion sensor doorbells use infrared,
but where did the idea of harnessing it to detect motion come from?
Well, back in 1800, astronomer William Herschel
used a prism to split sunlight into its colours
and found a form of invisible radiation
beyond the visible light spectrum.
Now, our eyes are sensitive to a particular range of frequencies
which we call visible light.
But visible light is merely a small part
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
He had discovered infrared.
And, most intriguingly, he realised it emitted
more heat than visible light.
Experimentations continued through the 19th century,
but it wasn't until the 20th century
that we really found a purpose for it - war.
ARCHIVE: These soldiers could have considered that the trees
and the darkness gave them reasonable concealment,
but to a man wearing electronic binoculars,
they're all clearly visible.
So how did this high-tech military kit get into our homes?
It just all comes down to mid-century suburbia.
In the late '60s in the USA,
a mix of economic and social pressures sent crime rates soaring.
People who had achieved the dream of owning their own home
were becoming increasingly concerned about people breaking into it,
about all the murderers and burglars who were potentially on the prowl,
and so there was a big increase in the demand for house alarms.
Burglar alarms that detected motion were available
but notoriously unreliable.
I've got some of them here. Just take a look at the, mwah,
beautiful technology that was available in the 1960s and '70s.
First up, you've got these little sisters here.
This is a photoelectric relay system.
One side, one unit has a little light beam coming out.
You can just see that there.
And this gets placed opposite the sister unit - the receiver.
I haven't hooked this up to an alarm.
I've actually hooked it up to an electric pencil sharpener.
I'm in a wood shop. When in Rome.
A beam of light travels across to the receiver,
but if you break that beam, an alarm is triggered.
SHARPENER WHIRS
And then there's my ultrasonic battery-powered one.
So, you face this against a wall
and then an ultrasonic beam bounces out from here, hits the wall,
and then comes back.
As long as nothing passes between the wall and the unit,
everything is hunky dory.
And now you will see why I was sharpening those pencils.
Because imagine that you have a leaf,
some particularly bulbous dust or an enthusiastic hamster
that happens to break the barrier of this thing...
ALARM SOUNDS ..then it's an absolute nightmare.
And now, over here, imagine that some person walks past
and knocks this, and then that's going off as well.
A whole neighbourhood is struggling,
the burglars are running amok, they can do whatever they want,
and it's an absolute... It's...
It's an absolute nightmare.
With false alarms rampant, the industry was in desperate need
of an alternative type of motion sensor.
Luckily, one clever man had just the solution
that would revolutionise the home burglar alarm.
There was a guy called Herbert Berman.
Now, since about the Second World War, Herbie had been
working in military research, and so he knew that the military
had a perfectly effective motion detection system
that used infrared.
It would send out a beam of infrared radiation,
wait for that beam to bounce back and use that to detect
if objects passed in front of the field of view.
The military system pumped out so much infrared
it needed expensive cooling towers to handle the heat.
But Herbie, he knew that those systems were complete overkill
for the suburban setting, and that meant
that he could design a system that didn't spit out infrared at all,
but just detected the existing infrared radiation
that was being given off by warm bodies
as they passed in front of the system.
And so, in the early 1970s, he submits a patent...
..for the first-ever passive infrared detection system -
the Intrusion System, as he calls it.
By only having to detect infrared energy rather than emit it,
this system proved far cheaper and simpler to run than the fancy
military versions, and therefore perfect for a burglar alarm.
And this has got all of the components
that you already recognise.
He's got a heat sensing element.
Essentially, this is now a motion detector.
PIRs, or passive infrared, became the motion sensor of choice
for burglar alarms - far more reliable than those early systems.
But these days it's also become a staple in everything
from automatic supermarket doors to those magical self-flushing toilets.
Computer brains, cameras and sensors make our doorbell smart,
but it wouldn't be a doorbell at all without our next component.
It's...
DING-DONG
..the chime.
I'm back at Ring to meet their sound sommelier.
Are you a doorbell connoisseur?
I am, in a way.
That is John Modestine,
Jamie, creator of Doorbot's original right hand man
and a fine chime expert.
How much thought did you put into the chime right at the beginning?
We intentionally had a couple of simple requirements.
One was that it was a new and unique sound,
but secondarily, it couldn't be so different and alien
from what people would expect the doorbell to sound like,
so we need to kind of fit in the middle there.
The sound we landed on, we launched on our first doorbell,
called Doorbot, and it sounds like this.
JINGLE PLAYS
Beautiful.
Yeah. It's just buttery smooth. Yeah, it is.
And then you have this very harsh... TINNY JINGLE PLAYS
You know? It's much sharper. Yeah.
Is it just me or does it sound like John prefers the original chime?
TINNY JINGLE PLAYS
Yeah, if you notice, they're similar notes,
but the frequency range on the Ring doorbell is much, much higher,
and that was strictly informed by the speakers within the devices.
So, Doorbot had a much bigger speaker
and allowed for much deeper, rich tones.
But the Ring doorbell had a much smaller speaker.
But it doesn't even look like a speaker.
So why did they change it?
Jamie really pressured me and the team to get this
as small as possible so it didn't protrude off the wall,
so that it would be more aesthetically appealing
and really match the architecture and styles of homes.
It might not have been their first choice...
TINNY JINGLE PLAYS
If you'd known how many thousands and thousands and thousands of times
you'd hear this sound in your life... Oh, my gosh.
..do you think that you would have fought a bit harder?
Maybe.
HANNAH LAUGHS
It's tough to say.
But it certainly served them well.
We came up with something...
TINNY JINGLE PLAYS
..and we launched it and it's rung true to this day.
I didn't even mean to do that. It's good, though.
And if I might just chime in one last time...
TINNY JINGLE PLAYS
..love it, hate it, you certainly won't forget it.
But how did we get to the sound of today's ding-dong?
Before doorbell chimes, visitors used to announce their presence
by simply knocking on doors...
..using knockers...
..or even calling out.
Is anybody home?
Not today, love.
By the 18th century, wealthier households
too posh to pummel their doors started using
mechanical bell pull systems... BELL RINGS
..for a more refined visitor experience.
But in the 1830s...
BUZZER SOUNDS
..an entirely new type of chime came to town.
I want to tell you a humdinger of a story.
It's about an American guy called Joseph Henry,
who was one of the great scientists of the 19th century.
But unlike the other guys like Faraday and Darwin,
you've probably never heard of him.
Joseph Henry was obsessed with the recent scientific discovery
of electromagnets.
Now, as the name might suggest, electromagnets are just magnets
that can be turned on or off with electricity.
Sort of say what you see.
And you can make one yourself using just a nail,
some copper wire and a battery.
Allow me to demonstrate.
You've got a nail with some wire around it.
Doesn't do anything interesting.
It's just a boring combination of two metals.
However, if you pass electricity through this wire,
you should expect a magnetic field to form.
A magnetic field that is capable of overcoming
the effects of gravity.
HANNAH LAUGHS
Look at that!
I'm not actually faking excitement.
No wonder this was a scientific curiosity.
No wonder all the cool kids in the science circles
were playing around with this.
Magnets have been attracting the coolest kids for nearly 200 years.
And, just like me, Henry was hooked.
He continues experimenting with electromagnets,
making them bigger and stronger.
Eventually, he builds one that can lift a tonne in weight...
..which is a world record at the time.
And that leaves him absolutely convinced
that these things can have a practical use.
The trouble was convincing everybody else of their potential.
Until, that is, he realises that the way to get his electromagnet noticed
is to turn it into something that everyone will want.
# Ooh, la, la. #
Go on, then, tell us what we made you make.
So this is a replica of Joseph Henry's electromagnetic doorbell.
That is inventor Ruth Amos and her latest cracking creation.
So Joseph Henry was obsessed with electromagnets
and his party trick is, he liked to rig up a doorbell -
button, electromagnetic chime,
and then he would press the button
and everyone would be genuinely amazed
at the fact that he had this chiming doorbell.
Wow. Things were simpler back in the 1830s.
You could just get a horseshoe, some copper wire
and entertainment for hours.
All right, so talk me through the design, then.
OK, so, we've got the button... Mm-hm.
..a little bell, and the way that this works is,
if you can see here, we've got an electromagnet,
and when the button is pressed,
the circuit will complete, which will mean this little...
Arm? ..arm... Lever? ..thing...
..will be drawn towards the magnet, which obviously dings the bell.
Now, that is a single ding, and what we have is a chime,
and what happens is, as the electromagnet
pulls the little lever towards it, that disconnects the circuit,
and so that stops being magnetic.
The little lever goes back down and then the circuit starts again
and it becomes magnetic, and so, literally, the little lever
goes back and forward and chimes the bell.
So this is quite useful. You could have a bell, it could ring
in different rooms, you could wire it up reasonably simply,
and then you would know if someone was at your door.
You wouldn't miss your important guests.
All the fancy rich people must have been clapping their hands with glee.
But let's see if it actually works.
Beautiful.
I'm channelling my 1830s ancestors.
It is connected. Let's see. OK, here we go.
BELL CHIMES QUIETLY
Oh, yeah, OK. Let me...
Try again.
No, not hitting the bell now.
Go!
BELL CHIMES
It works! Yay!
The look of glee on your face is absolutely amazing.
I mean, you would be impressed, wouldn't you? Can you imagine?
There's someone at the door in the east wing!
HANNAH LAUGHS
Turns out some copper wire and an old horseshoe
really is hugely entertaining.
Henry's electromagnetic chime was the world's first
electric ding-dong.
By the end of the century,
it had become the must-have gadget among the wealthy elite.
Incredibly, doorbells based on Henry's tech
kept ringing well into the 1960s,
when smaller, integrated bells took over
and the range of sounds expanded.
Hi, Helen. Gee, you look nice.
Now there's a man who knows what buttons to press.
By the 1970s, we'd gone far beyond just a simple ding-dong
and Big Ben doorbells were all the rage.
BIG BEN CHIMES
And with today's digital doorbells, you can,
to the delight of your door botherer,
belt out pretty much any sound under the sun.
Hello?
Today's doorbell lets us see and answer our front doors
from another room, another house, or even another country.
Our next component is the clever tech it uses to speak to the world.
It's the communication chip.
I'm back at Ring's LA headquarters.
Do these doorbells catch Santa as he goes around?
I'm sure it has. There's a lot of things these have caught.
That is chief technology officer and Santa catcher Dr Mike Balog,
who wants to show me just how swiftly
the doorbell can communicate with the world.
And Santa, obviously.
Merry Christmas!
That time we say from glass to glass,
from the image at the sensor to your phone, is really important.
So the glass on the front of this? On the front of the lens?
To the glass on the front of your mobile device.
And how long do you aim for that to be? In the two second range.
Less than that, right? Wow. OK.
I really like that there's, like, this kind of chain of things
that happen to turn this thing on. So the PIR sensor,
the radar's kicking in, the image recognition kicking in.
But then what happens?
Once we determine that we want to actually record something, right,
the image processor on this side will begin to capture the video
and then it'll talk to the communication chip.
And then the data will flow between the two of them
and the communication chip will then encrypt the data and send it
up to the cloud. How many people have got these on their doors?
Tens of millions, right? Definitely. That's a lot of data, then.
So data centres have been strategically positioned
around the world to spread the data load as equally
and quickly as possible.
Although, even then, certain days of the year prove difficult.
For us, the big day is Halloween.
Because of all the trick or treating?
Yes! I really like that.
That's really sweet.
Do you have to actually do anything to prepare for it?
So the teams actually spend a few months coming into Halloween getting
ready to be able to have the system scaled
and pressure-tested to make sure that everything
is going to operate as intended.
But we've seen up to 278% more concurrent live use sessions.
So like the number of concurrent sessions streaming to the cloud.
Like a massive load on the system? Massive.
Extraordinary.
Right.
Sounds like more trick than treat to me.
HE SCREAMS
With every recorded video being automatically uploaded
to the cloud, there are obviously concerns about how secure it is.
The idea is that, you know, the video is encrypted in a way
that only the communication chip is going to see it,
and then the communication chip then talks to our cloud.
I want to talk to you a little bit about the privacy of the footage.
What's your sort of take on that?
Privacy is very important for us. Right now,
the way the system has been built,
no employee can see any live views or drop into any calls.
It's not possible.
And the way that we have set up policies and access control,
it's extremely restricted to even see recorded videos, right?
We take that very seriously.
All sounds very reassuring.
And yet many doorbell companies have been susceptible to hackers
and rogue employees accessing customers' private footage.
So it's worth checking if you can get extra protection by ticking
an encryption box in your settings.
And it's no wonder opinion on these devices remains divided.
I think, when it comes to smart doorbells, it's very easy to either
get excited about the technology and what that allows you to do
or, on the other side, to be really concerned about the erosion
of privacy that they enable.
In 2021, a judge ruled that cameras and a doorbell on a house
in Oxfordshire unjustifiably invaded the privacy of a neighbour.
The judge said Mr Woodard's devices broke data laws
and contributed to harassment.
Which does make you wonder - if you're caught on camera,
what are your rights?
Well, by law, if you use a doorbell camera, you have to tell people
they're being filmed.
Hi, kitty!
Although in practice people often don't.
Hi!
And you can't share footage of someone without permission
unless it's to show probable criminal activity.
Which brings us to the flip side.
Doorbell footage has also been used as evidence in solving everything
from arson to high-profile murders.
Not forgetting the admittedly less
serious case of Mr Fry
of Weymouth - no relation - who accused his takeaway delivery
driver of eating his chips.
Whether they do more harm or good,
many of us have been seduced by the smart doorbell's ability
to connect, which all starts with the communication chip.
To find out how it works,
I'm bringing out the big guns.
Right. So here it is.
Right here.
The communication chip.
Now, this is doing something very clever indeed called
packetization, which I'll admit doesn't sound particularly sexy
but IS absolutely fundamental to the way that the internet works
and the reason you can chat to your postie from the other side
of the world.
It's taking all of the footage from your doorbell, all of the audio
data, all of the video data, and then, rather than just spewing
it out into the internet in one long stream, it is chopping
it down into teeny, teeny tiny little packets of data.
Smaller packets of data means that big files, like the video
from your doorbell, can be sent across the internet much faster
using a thing called packet switching.
It's pretty high-tech, but I can show you how it works
using my slightly less high-tech marble run.
Now, down here, these little marbles -
these are my packets.
These are like the little bytes of audio and video data
that need to be sent.
And the run itself -
this is like the structure of the internet,
all of the different routes that data can travel.
Some of this might be fibre optic cables.
Some of this might be satellites in the sky.
Now, in the bad old days, all the data would be sent in one big
old chunk, one single string of ones and zeros.
Which, as you can see,
is extremely slow and constantly getting stuck.
But with packet switching, each one of these packets can be sent
through the internet with the address of my phone - a header,
as it's known - knowing that it doesn't matter what route they take
because they can be reassembled when they arrive at the other end.
All within a millisecond of each other.
So the chip in your phone now is doing this job of the reassembly,
which reconstructs to a perfect H.
Now, this chip manages to do this thousands and thousands
and thousands of times,
reconstructing your original doorbell footage
on your phone within milliseconds, allowing you to have that seamless
conversation with your postie.
By making packet switching possible,
the communication chip gives us live access to our doorbell footage,
no matter where we are.
But where did the idea of breaking up data so it could be sent
around the world at speed come from?
Well, in the 1950s, the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the US
was hotting up.
With today's artillery,
we have extended the fist distances never before believed possible,
giving it a striking force that staggers the imagination.
As tensions rose, America decided to decentralise their high-level
communication system to stop a nuclear hit from Russia taking out
the whole network.
Cue electrical engineer Paul Baran.
It was a period of great danger with missile systems being built.
Both countries had their missiles aimed at each other.
Paul's solution was a network of connected computers that shared
information using packets of data sent via different routes.
In other words, packet switching.
Though he called it hot potato routeing, which I much prefer.
His work laid the foundation for ARPANET, an early version
of the internet that both the military and universities use
to share information and, in 1982, a young computer nerd would change
the world forever when he used packet switching and that early
internet system to talk to a vending machine.
We did not think this was a big deal at the time.
We just were having fun and we were thirsty.
That is David Nichols. In the 1980s,
he was a computer science grad student
at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.
We all loved our sodas.
You know, there was a culture of late night hacking.
So you get a Coca Cola to keep yourself awake.
CUCKOO!
My office was about a three or four-minute walk away from
the Coke machine in an adjacent building,
and one night I was sitting
there at my terminal and thinking, I want a Coke.
But I also know that it runs out from time to time,
and I'm going to walk over there and it may be out of Coke
and I'm going to be disappointed.
So, to avoid a long, needless trudge to an empty machine,
David and his fellow classmates did
what most computer students would do -
they found a technical solution.
The characteristic of a computer nerd is that they're happy to spend
days working on a programme that will save them ten seconds
every time they run it.
This Coke conundrum was like catnip to a coder's brain.
The machine used sensors to show how many sodas were in each column,
and David's classmate came up with a plan.
John Zsarnay had taken it on himself to take this idea and actually go
build the hardware that would interface with the Coke machine.
It was a microcomputer that fit in the ceiling
up above the Coke machine.
The computer hacked into the vending machine and found out how many sodas
were in it.
David was then able to write a programme that used packet switching
to retrieve and send the information via ARPANET -
that early internet system.
So the protocol that we had in the Coke machine
was a very simple one.
You would send a packet that essentially asked,
what's the state of this machine?
And you'd get a packet back that would say, oh, there's this many
columns of Cokes, this many buttons that you can push,
and the first and third one are empty, but the rest of them
have Cokes in it or whatever.
Now anyone on the ARPANET could connect to the machine,
whether you were in Pennsylvania or even California,
although that would be a really long way to go for a fizzy drink.
We didn't think it was interesting to anyone else on the world
whether our Coke machine was full, but when we discovered we could let
them know, of course we did it because that's too funny not to.
David didn't know it back in 1982, but the moment his vending machine
came online, it was the birth of what is now known
as the Internet of Things.
Many would say you're the inventor of the Internet of Things.
I don't know that many would!
Now, don't be modest, David.
The Internet of Things refers to the billions of devices
around the world that are controllable
by you via the internet.
Everything from light bulbs to TVs and, of course, your smart doorbell.
Did I foresee all of this? I don't think so.
When I left, the Internet of Things wasn't a thing.
We had built an Internet of Thing without an S.
Following on from David's Coke machine,
many connected technologies were to follow, like the notorious
Trojan Room coffee pot, a prototype camera installed in a room
at the University of Cambridge in 1991 to monitor
the all-important coffee supply.
Is it just me or is there a caffeine theme to all
of these inventions?
Every three seconds, an image is grabbed of the world's most
famous coffee pot.
The first live feed of an inanimate object.
Today, the Internet of Things is a near $1 trillion market...
..and it's estimated that, by 2030, there will be
125 billion smart devices.
All passing through their own communication chip.
The smart doorbell offers a window to the world from a piece
of technology fixed to your front door.
But what if you gave it wings
so it wasn't stuck in one place at all?
This is the future.
We can already see and speak to visitors at the door,
keep an eye on security and even chat to our pets if we want to.
Down, boy!
So what's next?
Well, come fly with me and find out.
She was taught by John Nash?
Yeah! He was the assistant in her physics class.
That is former student of the Beautiful Mind himself and
Ring CEO Liz Hamren.
She's giving me a sneak peek of a futuristic new prototype.
Tell me about the drone, then.
It is for inside your house.
And it is also for when you are not home.
It's quite unusual to have an internal drone. It is.
You know, people are used to seeing drones outside, and what the idea
there was, people don't necessarily want cameras in every part
of the interior of their home.
So we were like, well, how can we solve this problem?
And so we came up with this idea of this Always Home cam.
The drone is controlled by the same app as your smart doorbell
and similarly only starts to record when sensors located
around your house detect motion.
So it will stay docked.
And then, when something happens where there's a sound or a break
or sensors trip, the camera can undock, fly over to that area,
and then show you exactly what's happening.
Can we see it in action? Absolutely.
As the Always Home cam is still in development, the flight
is being closely monitored by technician Stephen.
So this is like a predetermined path? Yes.
And it's flying a path that it knows.
This home drone is pre-programmed to know the path around your house.
The red dots represent the waypoints of its planned route.
So what if I get in its way?
It's not going to hit me in the head? It is not.
To avoid bumping into obstacles, like my head,
it's also equipped with its own navigation technology, a combination
of cameras and depth sensors represented by the green dots
on this screen.
So now you've interrupted its path.
It sees you.
Maybe not my wisest idea to test out this theory with my face.
And just... Oh!
Just let it go.
It might give you an added sense of security, but there is a downside
to this futuristic flyer - for your furry friends.
Oh!
It is not meant for when you are home.
And that includes everyone - includes your dogs and your pets.
Like, it's literally for no-one home.
Which seems like a slight flaw in the design, considering over half
of the population have a pet of some sort in their house.
Could you use this to spy on other people?
No, because it is again designed to be indoors.
We would never encourage anyone to be spying on other people
with our products.
If only Stalin had had Liz's morals.
Our doorbells have come a long way - from the electromagnetic buttons
of the 19th century to the super high-tech home security
combos of today.
I think there's a few different perspectives that are worth
considering when it comes to smart doorbells.
You can see the appeal of never missing a delivery and getting
additional peace of mind.
Although any technology that invites even more surveillance
into our lives does need to be properly regulated and controlled.
But I think that there's one thing we can say for sure about smart
doorbells, which is that, even if you didn't ask for them,
they are not going away.
It's the motorway.
They are the backbone of the country.
HORN BEEPS What's he doing in that lane?
Do you know what I mean?
It's the story of some wild swimming...
SHE GASPS
It's cold!
..a Formula 1 legend...
I'm off the ground completely,
and there's no barrier.
..and a 1960s road sign revolution.
The signs that existed - they were absolutely chaotic.
The Open University has produced a free poster exploring what lies
behind the genius of some everyday objects.
To order a copy, call...
..scan the QR code or go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.