Overview
About the event
The first surveillance cameras were created by German engineer Walter Bruch and was installed by Siemens AG in Germany in 1942 to observe the launch of V-2 rockets. In the U.S. the first commercial closed-circuit television system, Vericon, became available in 1949.
The earliest video surveillance systems required constant human monitoring because at the time there was no way to record and store information. Then, when VCR technology became available in the 1970s, it became possible to record and erase information, causing the use of video surveillance to become much more practical and thus much more common.
Olean, New York was the first city in the United States to install video cameras along its main business street in an effort to fight crime in 1968. A few years later, in 1973, cameras also appeared in Times Square in New York City. In the 1980s video surveillance began to spread across the country, especially in public areas. Businesses that were especially prone to theft, such as banks and stores, also began to install surveillance cameras. In 1998, 3,000 CCTV systems were in use in New York City.
