How Coffee Inspired the Invention of the Webcam

Webcams are now such ubiquitous features of everyday life that it is really quite hard to imagine living without them.

But those of a certain age will recall times past when the internet was the stuff of science fiction and there weren't little eyes staring back at them from their screens.

How did we survive without Zoom meetings and facial recognition ID checks? Quite well, actually, but hey!

So, was the arrival of this form of communication foreseen, when was it invented and what does all this have to to do with coffee?

Did science fiction accurately predict the future of communication?

It is remarkable to see the extent to which modern technologies have been predicted by science fiction. 

Indeed, it is tempting to think that the writers of the original Star Trek TV series possessed crystal balls that actually worked.  Star Trek boasts a legendary reputation for its hit rate in anticipating the future of tech.

First broadcast in the 1960s, Star Trek introduced us to The Communicator. a handheld communication device that predicted the arrival of mobile phones in general and flip phones in particular. The show also showcased wireless earpieces. Communications officer Lieutenant Uhura famously wore a large, silver wireless earpiece to monitor subspace frequencies. 

Long before the invention of Zoom, FaceTime, or Skype, the crew of the Enterprise communicated face-to-face across quadrants using a viewscreen, thus predicting the evolution of the webcam.

But the concept of the videophone was first illustrated as early as 1927 in the movie Metropolis. The character Joh Fredersen used a bulky, wall-mounted unit with dials to establish a live video and audio connection to another location. 

In 1989, Back to the Future II predicted smart-TV video conferencing. Marty McFly takes an unexpected video call on his large living room screen, complete with a camera angle capturing his face and an on-screen data overlay displaying the caller's personal information.

When was the webcam invented?

The invention of the world's first webcam is a legendary piece of early internet history and here's where we find the connection to coffee.

Built in 1991 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by researchers Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Dr. Paul Jardetzky, the first webcam is now reffered to as the Trojan Room coffee pot camera.

It was fine example of how irritation rather than necessity can be the mother of invention.

Researchers were scattered across the different floors and wings of the lab building at the university. But the department was running on an extremely tight budget and so academics were forced to share a single filter coffee machine.

The coffee machine resided in a corridor outside what was known as the Trojan Room.

Those working inside the Trojan Room were close to the machine and so needed to take just a few steps to grab their coffees or to discover that the pot was empty.

On the other hand, researchers from the far flung corners of the building had to walk much longer distances and climb multiple flights of stairs to reach the coffee machine. It was a major frustration to arrive only to find an empty pot. This was a frustration that inspired innovation.

Stafford-Fraser and Jardetzky created a system for viewing the status of the coffee pot!  

How was the first webcam created?

To answer the all important question of whether there was coffee in the pot, Stafford-Fraser and Jardetzky rigged up a system using spare lab parts. They mounted an old grayscale video camera onto a laboratory retort stand and pointed it directly at the pot.

This camera was plugged into a video capture card hosted on a local computer. 

Jardetzky wrote the server software, and Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software. The system captured a tiny 128x128 pixel grayscale image.

The image of the coffee pot refreshed roughly three times a minute. Anyone running the "XCoffee" client on the local network could view a live icon of the pot on their screen.

Genius!

What about the internet?

For the first two years, the camera feed was strictly internal. However, in March 1993, early web browsers such as Mosaic introduced the capability to display images on web pages.

In November 1993, two further lab members, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson, realized they could easily hook the coffee feed up to the newly emerging World Wide Web. They updated the server code so that every time an external browser requested the image URL, the server fetched and delivered the latest frame from the camera. This was the moment the camera officially became the world's first true "webcam".

Once it had been connected to the internet, the Trojan Room coffee pot camera became a viral sensation. Millions of people around the world tuned in to watch a grainy, slow-loading picture of a coffee machine they would never use. It was mentioned on international broadcasts and the front pages of major newspapers. Tourists even traveled to Cambridge just to see the coffee machine!

What happened to the coffee machine and the camera?

The camera was finally switched off 22 August, 2001, after attracting millions of online viewers. Amusingly, the actual Krups coffee pot that inspired the invention was auctioned on eBay for £3,350 to Der Spiegel and later placed on display in a museum.