What do you think of this fact?
Some inventions come from grand visions. Others come from laziness. The world’s first webcam belongs in the second group. It had exactly one job: showing whether there was any coffee left.
The empty pot problem
Early 1990s, the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge: in a spot called the Trojan Room stood a coffee machine shared by a whole “coffee club.” But some members worked in other parts of the building. They had to climb several flights of stairs, only to find an empty pot far too often. The people in the Trojan Room had simply gotten there first.
In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky came up with a fix. They pointed a camera at the coffee machine and hooked it up to a computer through a video frame grabber. Jardetzky wrote the program that captured the images, Stafford-Fraser the one that displayed them. The name: XCoffee.
Coffee in 128 by 128 pixels
This wasn’t exactly high tech. The image was 128 by 128 pixels and grayscale, updated about three times a minute. For the crucial question, that was plenty: pot full or pot empty?
At first, it only worked on the university’s local network. In November 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson put the camera on the World Wide Web. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could watch a coffee pot in Cambridge.
A museum piece
On August 22, 2001, at 09:54 UTC, the camera was switched off. The Krups coffee machine was later auctioned on eBay, where it sold for 3350 pounds.
Since the summer of 2016, the coffee maker has been on permanent loan to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany.
Today, webcams sit on laptops, doorbells and birdhouses. The very first one just wanted to know if the walk to the pot was worth it.