The Coffee Pot That Started the Webcam Era
Zusammenfassung
The world’s first publicly accessible webcam was pointed at a coffee pot in the Trojan Room of Cambridge University’s Computer Science Department, set up in 1991. Computer scientists had installed a camera connected to a local network so they could check from their offices whether the coffee pot was empty before walking down the hall. When the system was connected to the early public web in 1993, it became accessible worldwide. In its final months before being switched off in August 2001, the Trojan Room coffee pot webcam attracted over 2 million visitors. The pot was auctioned on eBay for £3,350.
The Problem Worth Solving
In 1991, the Computer Science Department at Cambridge occupied multiple floors and a long hallway. The coffee pot — a filter machine in the Trojan Room — served coffee from a limited supply that required time to brew. Computer scientists walking to the machine and finding it empty was a routine source of frustration.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client program XCoffee and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server software that periodically captured a 128×128-pixel greyscale image from a camera pointed at the coffee pot and made it available on the local network. Colleagues could check the pot from their workstations before making the walk. The camera ran at approximately 3 frames per minute — fast enough to detect whether the pot was empty or full, not fast enough for anything resembling video.
Connection to the Web
In November 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson connected the coffee pot camera to the early public World Wide Web, making it accessible to anyone with a web browser. The URL was http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html.
The context matters: in 1993, the web had very few sites, almost none of which had live images. The Trojan Room coffee pot became one of the internet’s earliest interactive curiosities — a real object in a real room, viewable in near-real-time from anywhere in the world. It attracted attention disproportionate to its content because it demonstrated the web’s capacity for continuous, real-world information rather than static documents.
The Shutdown and the Auction
The coffee pot webcam ran continuously from 1991 to August 22, 2001 — ten years. The Computer Science Department announced the shutdown after the building was to be moved to a new location. The BBC covered the shutdown with live video; approximately 2.4 million page requests were made in the final weeks.
The coffee pot itself — a Krups filter coffee machine — was auctioned on eBay. The winning bid was £3,350 from Spiegel Online, the website of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which had the machine refurbished by Krups staff and installed in its Hamburg offices. The original XCoffee program that made the whole thing work is preserved in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s archives.
The coffee pot’s decade-long run illustrates a pattern in internet history: the web’s most distinctive content in its early years came not from media companies but from individuals and institutions making small pieces of their physical world visible to the global network.