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One of the Earliest Baby Monitors
Now that I am about to become an aunt, I am learning about all sorts of things that I never read or heard about at school. Some are things that I used to think could never be of any interest to me. Take for example, the information that I gathered during a recent visit to the home of my father’s brother and his wife.
Not long ago I had a conversation with my cousin and his mother. During that conversation my cousin asked his mother the name of one or more stores in Los Angeles with the best baby monitors. My aunt did not know where he should go for a baby monitor, an item that he and his wife will soon need. My aunt had never used such a device. However, she did provide us with an interesting story about one of the earliest baby monitors.
According to my aunt her maternal grandfather had loved to work with electrical gadgets. He had spent much of his life working for Edison. One time he even got an electrical shock and had to go to the hospital. Still, that did not prevent him from continuing to work with electrical circuits.
Therefore, my aunt’s grandfather had quickly come-up with a solution to one of his daughter’s problems. That problem had arisen as a result of his daughter’s move to a new home. The problem had concerned his daughter’s inability to hear either of her two toddlers while she was down in the basement doing the laundry.
Even in the early 1950s, my aunt’s grandfather knew where to get the sort of equipment that could pick-up sounds and convert them into electrical signals. He purchased such equipment, and he placed it up in the bedroom where my aunt and her sister would take their afternoon naps.
My aunt’s grandfather then took a long electrical wire, and he worked that wire down through the wall into the basement. He later connected the wire to a second electrical device, one capable of converting the electrical signals back into sound waves. He had thus created one of the earliest baby monitors.
At this point you may be curious to know why my aunt did not want a baby video monitor, so that she could catch the action in the upstairs rooms on a baby monitor video screen. In the 1950s a way to make video available to the general consumer had not yet been invented. My aunt has assured my cousin and me that, if a video monitor had then existed, her grandfather would have found a way to provide his daughter with one.
My aunt does not like to work with electrical equipment, but she does like to write about electric circuits. She just finished an article for Boys’ Quest Magazine titled “Oliver’s Electric Circuit.” She expects to see that article in print just shortly before my niece turns 3 years old. Maybe she will one day read that article to her granddaughter. Perhaps her granddaughter will become an electrical engineer.
I think that my aunt’s grandfather had some sort of gene that motivated his interest in electricity, and I think that my aunt passed-on that same gene to her older son. That young man, who will eventually become the oldest uncle for the niece that I now await, loves to play with electrical wires. It would not surprise me if he were to find a way to design a 21st Century version of the sort of baby monitor that my aunt’s grandfather once made.
written by Sue Cher