The world's first webcam was invented to watch a coffee pot
At Cambridge in 1991, researchers pointed a camera at a coffee machine so they'd never make a wasted trip to an empty pot.
In 1991, in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, researchers had a very ordinary problem: the shared coffee pot sat down a corridor, and people kept walking over only to find it empty.
The fix became the world’s first webcam. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky aimed a camera at the Trojan Room coffee machine and wired it into a frame-grabber, so a small greyscale image of the pot updated a few times a minute on lab computers. Stafford-Fraser wrote the viewing software, fittingly named XCoffee.
It was, he later admitted, a trivial bit of fun:
It only took us a day or so to construct.
In 1993, after web browsers learned to display images, colleagues connected the feed to the new World Wide Web — and the humble coffee pot became an international celebrity. It was finally switched off in 2001, by which point millions of strangers had checked the lab’s coffee levels.
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