In his book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, WitoldRybczynski describes this early form of home automation in a way that sounds like the 19th Century equivalent of a venture backed start-up.
For such an apparently dull subject, Witold Rybczynski's brief history is a charming work that gracefully threads its way back to the origins of precision manufacturing and, in the process, the origins of the modern world.
"Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, " by architect WitoldRybczynski and landscape architect Laurie Olin, is one of a number of popular and scholarly histories that in the past two decades have sought to redress this ideological imbalance.