Was the first webcam really pointed at a coffee pot?

Video calls, livestreams and doorbell cameras are all part of everyday life now. You might expect the story of the webcam to begin in a high-tech security lab or a space agency. Instead, it starts with a group of tired computer scientists who were fed up with walking to an empty coffee pot.

The short answer

Yes. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory pointed a camera at the coffee pot in a corridor outside a room known as the Trojan Room. The live picture let them check from their desks whether there was coffee before they made the trip. In November 1993 the images went onto the World Wide Web, and the “CoffeeCam” became one of the internet’s first celebrities.

The real story

Arriving to find the pot empty was an irritation, so the team rigged up a solution. A video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer grabbed images from the camera. Paul Jardetzky wrote the server program, and Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software, called XCoffee, which showed a small picture of the pot on colleagues’ screens.

The image was tiny and basic: 128 by 128 pixels in greyscale. But it did the job. For the first couple of years it only worked on the lab’s internal network. Then, once web browsers could display images, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson made the picture available over the web in 1993. Suddenly people all over the world could watch a coffee pot in Cambridge slowly empty and refill.

Here is the twist: something built purely to save a few pointless walks became a genuine piece of internet history. The camera stayed on for about a decade. It was finally switched off at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001. Even then the story wasn’t over. The last coffee machine seen on the camera, a Krups, was later sold on eBay for £3,350 to the German news site Spiegel Online.

Why people get it wrong

We tend to imagine big inventions coming from big, serious projects with big budgets. The idea that the webcam began as a lazy coffee hack feels too silly to be true. In reality, many useful technologies started as someone solving a small, annoying problem in their own office.

There’s also some debate over what counts as the “first” webcam, since the camera was on a local network for two years before it reached the web. But the Trojan Room coffee pot is widely recognised as the first famous one, and it is certainly the most delicious.

“Biggest leap in internet history, and it was all so a bunch of boffins didn’t have to walk down a corridor for nothing.”