Origins
From X10 to Matter: where the smart home comes from
The idea of a house that thinks along is fifty years old. A short history of home automation – from a Scottish plug socket to a common standard.
The smart home is not an invention of the smartphone era. The first houses that switched lights and appliances by themselves existed long before the first iPhone. Anyone who knows the origins also understands why so many systems exist side by side today.
1975: a signal over the power line
It began with X10, developed by Pico Electronics in Glenrothes, Scotland. The idea was strikingly simple: control commands are modulated onto the existing 230-volt line, and every socket and every lamp gets an address. No new cables, no radio modules. X10 was slow and prone to interference, but affordable – and it proved that a house can take commands.
The nineties: the bus enters the building
In Europe, the electrical industry and installers took a different route. In the early nineties the European Installation Bus, EIB, was created: a separate, green-sheathed cable laid parallel to the mains, over which buttons, actuators and sensors talk to each other. In 1999 EIB, BatiBUS and EHS merged to form the KNX Association. KNX has been an international standard ever since and remains backwards compatible to this day: a button from the nineties keeps working in a current installation.
The 2000s: radio and new ideas
Z-Wave and Zigbee brought radio standards that need no bus cable. They made retrofitting possible, with all the drawbacks of batteries and range. From the environment of ETH Zurich came digitalSTROM, which moves the intelligence into tiny terminals behind the switch and, like X10 before it, communicates over the power line. In 2009 Loxone was founded in Kollerschlag, Upper Austria – with the aim of offering home automation from a single source, built around a central computer, the Miniserver.
The 2010s: the smart home becomes a consumer product
In 2011 Nest presented a thermostat that learned when the residents were at home. In 2012 came Philips' coloured Hue lamps, in 2014 the first Echo speaker with Alexa and Apple's HomeKit, in 2016 Google Home. Suddenly the smart home was in every electronics store – but every device spoke its own language and needed its own app. Out of that frustration, Home Assistant also emerged in 2013, open software that brings hundreds of systems under one roof.
2022: Matter, the common denominator
Not until 2022 did Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, together with the Connectivity Standards Alliance, agree on Matter, a standard that lets a device work on all the major platforms at once. The circle closes: what X10 began with one address per socket is today a worldwide standard with certification.
What remains from the history
We draw three lessons from fifty years of home automation. First: cables outlive radio standards. Second: open standards outlive companies. Third: the best system is the one the residents can still operate after ten years without looking for the manual. That is exactly what we measure every installation against that we plan in Solothurn and the surrounding region.
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