With earthquakes rattling southern Europe this summer, more homeowners ask engineers a simple question: “How can I sleep without fear?” One increasingly popular answer on both sides of the Atlantic is the humble friction damper. Unlike flashy base-isolation bearings that lift an entire building, a friction damper is a shoe-box-sized steel cartridge that slips inside existing braces or wall studs, turning kinetic shake into harmless heat. Installation takes hours, costs roughly the price of a new kitchen, and needs zero maintenance—no oil, no electronics, no post-quake replacement. Recent tests at a Canadian university showed structures fitted with the latest inline units suffered markedly less drift and re-centered automatically, letting families return the same evening instead of waiting months for repairs. A Danish firm reports a noticeable rise in U.S. inquiries since the Turkey–Syria quakes, while California contractors advertise retrofits that can pay for themselves through lower insurance premiums. For Europeans wary of bureaucratic retrofit grants, friction dampers offer a rare shortcut: they slip into nineteenth-century masonry as easily as into new timber frames, satisfying seismic codes without visible changes to façades. In short, the device is becoming the smoke alarm of seismic safety—small, affordable, and quietly indispensable.