> One such contraption is a teas-maid, a kind of physical portmanteau of an alarm clock and a tea-making machine that starts boiling the water right before it w

> One such contraption is a teas-maid, a kind of physical portmanteau of an alarm clock and a tea-making machine that starts boiling the water right before it wakes you. The word is 'Teasmade' ("tea's made") not 'teas-maid'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teasmade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teasmade . They were probably never quite mainstream and fully accepted in the UK, but they certainly did sell pretty well for decades. They seem to have fallen by the wayside over the past roughly two decades, but they're still notable as, effectively, one of the earliest and most successful IoT gadgets.