The first webcam was built to watch a coffee pot

3 min read

The first webcam had nothing to do with video calls, security or streaming. It was set up by a group of computer scientists at the University of Cambridge who were tired of walking to an empty coffee pot. For years, the most watched live camera on the early internet showed little more than a filter jug in a corridor.

A problem measured in staircases

In 1991, about fifteen researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory shared a single filter coffee machine. It stood in the corridor outside a room known as the Trojan Room. Members of the informal coffee club working on other floors had to climb several flights of stairs to reach it, and the trip was often wasted because the pot had already been drained.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, who were working on networking research, decided to fix this. They fixed a spare video camera on a retort stand, pointed it at the pot and ran a cable under the floor to a video frame grabber attached to a computer in the Trojan Room.

How XCoffee worked

Jardetzky wrote a server program that captured images of the pot every few seconds. Stafford-Fraser wrote a client program, called XCoffee, that displayed a small greyscale picture of the pot in the corner of a researcher’s screen. The image updated about three times a minute, which was plenty for answering the only question that mattered. According to Stafford-Fraser, the whole system took about a day to build.

At first, the picture could only be seen on the laboratory’s internal network. That changed once web browsers became able to display images. On 22 November 1993, colleagues Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson connected the camera to the World Wide Web, and anyone with an internet connection could check the state of a coffee pot in Cambridge. Guinness World Records recognises it as the first webcam.

An accidental tourist attraction

The coffee pot became famous almost immediately. The University of Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College recalls that a viewer in Australia complained the image was too dark to see at night, so the team left a desk lamp switched on to keep the pot visible for viewers in the Southern Hemisphere. The page passed one million views within about three years, an enormous figure for the web of the mid-1990s. The Times described it as the biggest tourist attraction in East Anglia.

The story was picked up by the Washington Post and the BBC, and the pot made its way into BBC Radio 4’s long-running drama The Archers. For many people, it was a first glimpse of the idea that the internet could show something happening somewhere else, live.

The end of the brew

The camera was switched off on 22 August 2001, when the Computer Laboratory moved to new premises. The pot itself, a Krups machine, was sold on eBay for £3,350 to Spiegel Online, the website of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which later put it back online in its own office.

The project’s legacy is far bigger than the jug. Webcams are now built into laptops, phones and doorbells, and live video is an everyday part of work and social life. The underlying idea is the same one the Cambridge team had in 1991: point a camera at something you care about and let the network carry the picture to wherever you happen to be. They just happened to care most about coffee.