Tom Scott

I Should Not Have Liked the World’s First Smart Home.

The video takes viewers to Cragside, the Northumberland estate built by Victorian industrialist Sir William George Armstrong, widely regarded as the world’s first “smart home.” Armstrong equipped the house with a network of hydraulic and electrical systems: a water‑driven turbine powered central heating, a massive Dent master clock synced to Greenwich, rotating rotisserie spits, a domestic passenger lift, and a hydro‑electric generator supplied by Siemens that lit the gallery with early incandescent bulbs. Curator Clara notes the precision of the Dent clock, while the narrator recounts a ten‑year‑old boy safely placing mercury‑charged lamps into a bowl of liquid metal—an early, hazardous solution before light switches existed. Armstrong also installed a private telephone line to his Newcastle factory, illustrating his obsession with real‑time control. Cragside demonstrates that the integration of sensors, automated mechanisms, and remote control predates modern smart‑home tech by more than a century, offering a blueprint for today’s engineers and posing preservation dilemmas about which historical period to showcase.