The World's First Webcam Watched a Coffee Pot
Abstract
The first webcam was not invented for security, science, or vanity. It was invented so that computer scientists would stop walking down the hall to an empty coffee pot. In 1991, researchers in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at the shared filter-coffee machine and wrote software to broadcast a small, low-resolution image of it onto the local network, so anyone could check from their desk whether coffee was available before making the trip. In November 1993 the feed was connected to the brand-new World Wide Web, making the Trojan Room coffee pot the first thing ever watched by a webcam, a global audience tuning in to a kettle in England.
XCoffee
The Trojan Room in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory housed several researchers and one communal coffee machine on a different floor from many of the people who depended on it. The walk to find the pot empty was a recurring small tragedy. In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky rigged a camera on a retort stand aimed at the pot, connected it to a frame grabber on a local computer, and wrote a client–server program called XCoffee: the server captured an image a few times a minute, and a small client window on a researcher’s workstation showed the current state of the pot (empty, full, or somewhere in between) in grainy greyscale.
It was a purely practical hack, running only over the lab’s internal network, and it solved exactly the problem it was built for.
Going Global
In November 1993, with the World Wide Web barely two years old and Mosaic having just made it browsable with images, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson connected the coffee-pot feed to the web. The image was now reachable by anyone, anywhere, with a browser. The Trojan Room coffee pot became an internet celebrity, one of the most famous early web destinations precisely because it was so absurd: people around the world checking, in real time, on the coffee supply of a room they would never visit.
The camera ran until August 2001, when the lab moved buildings. The final image was captured, the feed switched off, and the by-then historic coffee pot was auctioned on eBay, bought, fittingly, by a German magazine, and restored to working order.
The coffee pot is remembered as the origin point of an entire medium. Every video call, security cam, livestream, and content creator’s webcam descends from a camera that existed only so that hungry researchers would not be disappointed by an empty jug.