Webcams and their underlying software form the backbone of communications in the modern, connected world.
But these sophisticated devices owe their roots to a group of caffeine-fueled computer scientists who just wanted to know if there was coffee left in the pot at their research lab without leaving their desks.
Back in 1991, when the web was still in its infancy, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky were researching ATM networks in the depths of the Trojan Room, part of the Computer Lab at Cambridge University, England.
The duo were part of a wider team of 15 or so programmers involved in the research, which was intellectually taxing work fueled by copious amounts of caffeine, and a freshly brewed pot never lasted long.
“Being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room,” Stafford-Fraser commented retrospectively in a Cambridge University blog post.
Frustrated by frequently venturing down to the coffee machine only to find the pot empty, Stafford-Fraser and Jardetzky devised a solution to check the coffee pot without needing to leave their desks.
As recalled by Stafford-Fraser in a 2001 retrospective article, they used a 128 x 128px grayscale camera, pointing it at the coveted Krups coffee maker, a frame grabber, an Acorn Archimedes computer and some custom software.
Jardetzky wrote the server-side program that stored the three grayscale images snapped per minute on the university network, and Stafford-Fraser crafted the interface that the researchers used to access the images from their computers.
Aptly named XCoffee, the monitoring system only took the pair “a day or so” to put together. But as Stafford-Fraser later commented, hilariously, that it was “more useful” than anything else he wrote while working in the Trojan Room.
Two years after XCoffee launched, fellow researchers Dan Gordon and Martyn Johnson modified the original system and connected it to the internet, subsequently creating the first ever webcam.
Over the next couple of years, the Trojan Room coffee pot gained widespread press attention and, in 1995, Stafford-Fraser wrote the Trojan Room Coffee Pot Biography to satisfy the growing interest. By 1998, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot webpage celebrated its fifth birthday while surpassing 2 million hits, gaining something of a cult following.
“Perhaps the coffee pot camera has something of the appeal of early silent movies. There is, after all, no accompanying audio (now why didn't we think of that?), and the image is black and white with a very low frame rate,” Stafford-Fraser said in 2001.
Despite the mundane subject and less-than-appealing grayscale colors, images of the Trojan Room coffee pot continued to captivate people until 2001.
That year, the Computer Lab moved to a different building in Cambridge University; the webcam system was shut down and the now legendary longest-serving pot sold on eBay for £3,350 ($4,420 / AU$6,410) to raise money for coffee facilities in the new lab.
On August 22 2001 the webcam captured its final image, showing the fingers of Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson and Quentin Stafford-Fraser pressing the power-off switch on the Acorn Archimedes that had captured the images for the preceding 7 years and 9 months.
And so passed into history a quirky and simple, yet revolutionary camera system that inspired the high-speed, color-rich livestreaming we enjoy today. Alas, as Stafford-Fraser revealed, it didn’t make the coffee “any better, though”.
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Take a look at the best 4K webcams and the best webcams for working from home. Alternatively, many cameras (such as the Canon PowerShot V1) can be used as plug-and-play webcams via a USB connection.
