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The World's First Webcam Watched a Coffee Pot

Abstract

The first webcam was not built for security, science, or vanity. It was built 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 machine and wrote software to put a small greyscale image of it on 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 World Wide Web, and the Trojan Room coffee pot became the first object watched by a webcam. It ran until 22 August 2001, then sold on eBay for £3,350 to a German news site.

XCoffee

The Trojan Room in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory housed several researchers and the frame grabber; the communal coffee machine stood in a corridor on another floor. Walking down and finding the pot empty was a routine annoyance. In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky fixed a camera to a retort stand, aimed it at the machine, and ran the wires under the floor to the frame grabber. Jardetzky wrote the server that captured the images; Stafford-Fraser wrote the client, XCoffee, which showed the current state of the pot in a small window on a researcher’s workstation.

The picture was 128×128 pixels, greyscale, updated about three times a minute. That was enough to tell full from empty and nothing like video. The system ran only over the lab’s internal network, and it solved exactly the problem it was built for. Its first press mention came from Bob Metcalfe, who wrote about XCoffee in Comm Week on 27 January 1992.

Going Global

The original frame grabber eventually failed. In November 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson revived the system with a new one and put the images on the World Wide Web, then barely two years old and freshly browsable with pictures thanks to Mosaic. The page lived at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html, and the pot was suddenly visible to anyone with a browser.

In 1993 the web had few sites and almost no live images. The coffee pot drew attention out of all proportion to its content because it showed something the web had not been used for: a real object in a real room, updating on its own, viewable from anywhere. By the time it was switched off, the counter had passed 2.4 million visitors.

Shutdown and Auction

The Computer Laboratory moved to the William Gates Building, and the camera was switched off for good on 22 August 2001 at 09:54 UTC. The last frame showed the pot being unplugged. The shutdown made the front pages of The Times and The Washington Post, with further coverage in The Guardian and Wired.

The machine itself, a Krups filter maker, went to eBay. Spiegel Online, the website of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, won it for £3,350. Krups technicians refurbished the pot free of charge, and it went back to work supplying coffee to the Hamburg editorial office. Since summer 2016 it has been on permanent loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn.

The web’s early character came largely from things like this: individuals and institutions wiring small pieces of their physical world onto the network, for no better reason than that they could. See The Connected World.

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