One of the first live images broadcast on the internet wasn't a spacecraft or a concert. It was a coffee machine. More precisely, it was a grayscale, icon-sized image on a screen showing whether the coffee machine was full or empty.
The roots of the webcam idea, which is everywhere today, lie with a few researchers at the University of Cambridge who were tired of climbing stairs.
The problem: an empty pot, wasted stair climbs
In 1991 the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge had a coffee machine shared by the researchers. The machine was in the corridor near the building's room called the Trojan Room. People working on other floors of the building climbed the stairs for coffee and often found the pot empty.
According to Quentin Stafford-Fraser's own account, the solution was simple: they fixed a camera to a lab stand pointed at the machine and connected the cables to a frame-grabber card in a computer in the Trojan Room. Paul Jardetzky wrote the server program that captured the image, and Stafford-Fraser wrote the client program that displayed it on screen.
The hardware side was pure improvisation too. According to Wikipedia, the camera was connected to a video capture card in an Acorn Archimedes computer. The server captured an image every few seconds and could send it to any requesting computer at different resolutions. Nobody thought it would one day enter the history books. The aim was just not to climb stairs for nothing.
XCoffee: tracking coffee on the office network
The client program was called XCoffee and ran on the X Window System. According to Wikipedia, the image was 128x128 pixels and grayscale. According to Stafford-Fraser, the small image on screen refreshed about three times a minute.
Even that was enough. Researchers could see whether there was coffee in the pot without getting up from their desks. In its early years the system ran only on the lab's own network, so nobody outside could watch. In today's terms it was an "intranet camera". But the idea was complete: seeing the current state of a faraway place on screen without going there. The only thing missing was a way to open the image to everyone.
1993: the coffee opens to the world
In November 1993 Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson revived the system and opened the image over HTTP, that is, to the World Wide Web. From anywhere in the world, a coffee machine in Cambridge could now be looked at with a browser.
That's why the Trojan Room coffee machine is usually called the "first webcam". There is a fine distinction here: the camera began working on the network in 1991, but was opened to the web in 1993. The "1991/1993" in the video describes exactly these two dates.
After the lab moved into the William Gates Building, the camera was switched off on August 22, 2001, at 09:54 UTC.
| The 1991 coffee camera | Today's webcam |
|---|---|
| 128x128 pixels, grayscale | High resolution, color |
| About 3 frames a minute | Smooth live video |
| Frame-grabber card and a separate computer | Built into the laptop bezel |
| Single purpose: is the pot full? | Meetings, streaming, security |
The machine's later life
The story doesn't end with the camera. According to Wikipedia, the last coffee machine seen online (a Krups) sold on eBay for 3,350 pounds. This information is based on Der Spiegel. The machine was later repaired free of charge by Krups employees and put back to work in the magazine's editorial offices. Since summer 2016 it has been on permanent loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany.
The machine's fame also became the subject of jokes. An April Fools' RFC from 1998, the "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol", winked at this legend. The coffee machine was also mentioned in the video game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin in 2002 and in BBC Radio 4's The Archers on February 24, 2005. Wikipedia writes that "four or five" different coffee machines appeared on the camera over the years, but also notes that this figure needs to be clarified.
A small annoyance, a big idea
The sweetest thing about the Trojan Room story is that nobody set out to "invent the webcam". The annoyance was very ordinary: climbing stairs for nothing because of an empty pot. But that small annoyance made the idea of watching a faraway place live concrete in everyone's eyes.
How many of the technologies we use today, do you think, were born from such an ordinary bit of boredom?