A professor of communications disorders at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Nober didn’t invent the household smoke alarm, but he helped make it effective.
His studies, completed in 1978, showed how loud an alarm was necessary to sound for how long to awaken even the deepest of sleepers. He also designed flashing detectors to alert deaf people. Smoke detectors may sound loud, but he discovered that even “loud enough” detectors took about 3 minutes on average to rouse people enough to understand what was going on and to take action. He died May 23 at home in Arlington, Virginia, from liver cancer. He was 77.