The first webcam watched a coffee pot in Cambridge
In 1991, the coffee machine at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory stood in a corridor outside a room called the Trojan Room. For people working a few floors away, the trip was often wasted. By the time they arrived, the researchers who worked through the night in the Trojan Room had usually emptied the pot.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky solved it with a camera. They fixed it to a retort stand, pointed it at the pot, and ran a cable under the floor to a frame grabber, a card that turns video into digital pictures, on a spare computer in the Trojan Room.
Jardetzky wrote a server that captured images every few seconds. Stafford-Fraser wrote a client, XCoffee, that showed a small greyscale picture in a corner of the screen for anyone on the lab's network. It updated about three times a minute, often enough to tell whether the walk was worth it.
From the lab to the web
At first, only people on the lab's own network could see it. Then the original frame grabber failed, and the system nearly faded away. In November 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson revived it with a new frame grabber and put the images on the World Wide Web. Anyone, anywhere, could now check a coffee pot in Cambridge.
It became a popular landmark of the early web: a live picture of a pot that almost none of its viewers would ever drink from.
The camera was switched off on 22 August 2001, after the lab moved to the William Gates Building, and the shutdown made the front pages of The Times and The Washington Post. The last Krups machine seen online was auctioned on eBay for £3,350. It was later refurbished and, since 2016, has been on permanent loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany.
Video calls, doorbell cameras and live streams all do what that camera did: show you a place you are not in, as it is right now. The first one answered a simple question. Is there any coffee left?
Why was the Trojan Room camera set up?
The first webcam was built to save a walk to an empty coffee pot, and a lab's small convenience became one of the early web's best-known pages.
