These tools allowed you to physically work to control the temperature. That was on top of all of the labor required by the rest of living. Sometimes it was too much. (Get up and bar the door!) Such was the poor state of human thermal management until the Mennonites brought us a Dutch inventor by the name of Cornelis Drebbel.
Drebbel’s Incubator
Born in Alkmaar, North Holland in 1572, Drebbel was the fair-haired, handsome son of a landowner (or farmer, history is vague on the details).1 At an early age, he was sent to apprentice under the engraver Hendrick Goltzius, whose interest in alchemy rubbed off on the young pupil. Alkmaar at the time was also home to a large group of Mennonite scientists and inventors, and Cornelis’ young mind showed both an interest in and aptitude for invention. In his mid-to-late 20s, he was granted patents for a pump, a “perpetual motion” clock, and a chimney design. After marrying Feijtge, one of the younger sisters of his master (hey, a young apprentice can’t be expected to engrave all the time), he moved to seek greater fortunes in London. There his inventions caught the attention of King James I, and he was invited into the service of Henry, Prince of Wales, where he worked on other inventions. Despite a brief stint at court in Prague, it was in England that Cornelis lived out his days and invented what is regarded as the first automatic temperature regulator.
It worked like this: Inside an oven, furnace, or incubator, the warming air would cause a column of mercury to slowly rise until it would close a damper on the heat source. This closure allowed the temperature to drop back down slowly, lowering the mercury and reopening the damper. The simple feedback mechanism allowed Drebbel to tweak the height of the column of mercury and the qualities of the damper to gain fairly good automatic control over the temperature.
For the first time, people didn’t need to put in manual effort to manage the specific warmth of a space. What is now known as a feedback loop inside the machine managed it all for them automatically. It was a lot less work. Using the Drebbel system, people didn’t need to use a tool, but could just set up a heat source and leave it running until they no longer wanted the heat.
Others would later invent competing mechanisms, but they were still its conceptual heirs.
In 1885, Albert Butz was granted a patent on a device with the ungainly name of “damper flapper,” which lifted a flap as it got cold, fueling a fire with more air, and lowering again as it heated up. That patent gained the attention of a young engineer named Mark Honeywell, who purchased it and 20 years later under the auspices of the Electric Heat Regulator Company released the Jewell thermostat to the market. It included a thermometer to add some objective data to the temperature-setting task.
Around the same time, Warren S. Johnson used pneumatics in the late 1880s to allow for automatic temperature control in individual rooms. His product formed the basis of Johnson Controls, which has since evolved into the megacorporation Johnson & Johnson.
The invention of electricity allowed engineers in the 1950s to replace clunky analog components with tidier wires and circuits. In that same decade, Henry Dreyfuss, working for the now-giant Honeywell corporation, introduced the Round, a gorgeously designed thermostat that combined the thermometer readout with the control wheel in a unified way. It was not only an icon of gorgeous mid-century modern design, but it was also the thermostat control in most homes for nearly three decades.
In the 1980s, the Round2 was displaced by cheaper molded plastic boxes, and its electrical wiring was replaced with computer circuitry, making thermostats cheaper to produce and their electronic insides more durable. A few thermostats introduced the option to connect an air conditioner as well, giving the user a switch that shifted from a HEAT mode for winter to a COOL mode for summer. A precious few enabled you to set hot and cold limits in a single control. But despite these improvements, for our purposes, each of these changes was incremental. It wasn’t until well after the Age of Computers that thermostats made another major leap in evolution.
But before we get there, let me make a last appreciative shout-out to Cornelis, who, by the way, also invented revolutionary new dyeing techniques, the first submarine, a solar-powered harpsichord, and magic lantern devices. He furthered the field of optics and wrote a treatise on alchemy that would remain popular and in print for 100 years. Sadly owing to the capricious attentions of the royal court, the unlucky fellow died poor. His peers Kepler and Galileo are revered as historical geniuses, but Drebbel is a footnote with the occasional historian’s nod. We did name a crater on the moon for you, Cornelis. It’s the least we could do for centuries of your legacy.
Then the Nest Learning Thermostat
That aforementioned leap of thermostat evolution is, of course, the Nest Learning Thermostat. Let’s look at how the Nest Thermostat is different than what came before it.
Even with feedback control mechanisms on older thermostats allowing people to set the temperature thresholds that suited them best, those “dumb” thermostats still had to have their thresholds adjusted to account for personal tastes, time of day, humidity, and the seasons. In contrast, the Nest Thermostat connects to the home network to know the home’s location and the calendar date. It knows the humidity and current weather. It knows how long it takes to change your home’s temperature. It has smart defaults such that most people can just hook it up and let it run. But when homeowners find themselves uncomfortable at any time and adjust the temperature, the Nest Learning Thermostat pays attention to the change. It regards it as input. It learns. OK, its algorithm thinks, this family likes it a little cooler in spring. Got it. I’ll remember that for next spring. (And its memory is perfect.)
Power users of the device can set up schedules that save on energy usage, either while they are routinely away at work and school, or for ad-hoc times like vacations and business trips. It talks to and coordinates with their carbon monoxide alarm and outdoor cameras. Rich feedback mechanisms, piped to smartphones and websites, help users visualize energy consumption and engage both ecological and competitive sensibilities to encourage saving money and energy.
The Nest Thermostat is still evolving as a product and refining its ability to deliver on its promise, but let’s take a moment to consider how far the concept of the thermostat has come.
Recap: From Tool to Agent
The palm frond and fan are tools that let you cool yourself. Drebbel’s incubator was a system that let you set a threshold to run against until further notice. The Nest Thermostat acts as a personal temperature regulator. It is as if you had hired a wise and happy butler to stand there at the thermostat, using everything that he knows about the clock, public and personal calendars, as well as the general preferences and statuses of the people in the house, to help them effortlessly achieve that persistent challenge that was bestowed upon them by Tetraceratops insignis eons ago—to keep themselves at a comfortable temperature. Even if its best guess is wrong, it’s happy to adjust to your request—and moreover to remember. That is a thermostat that has evolved.
This remarkable evolution is happening not just to thermostats, but to almost every device and service that you use. As you’ll see in the next chapter, tools are becoming agentive.