MAGAZINE

The world’s first webcam watched a coffee pot

Before millions of people watched a beach in Waikiki or a square in Prague live, the world’s very first connected camera was fixed on something far less exotic: a coffee pot at the end of a corridor in Cambridge. A brief history of the accidental invention of planetary live streaming — born, as so often, of very ordinary laziness.

In the early 1990s, the University of Cambridge computer laboratory occupied an old building with punishing staircases. In a room called the Trojan Room stood the department’s only coffee maker. The problem was both universal and tiny: you climbed two flights full of hope only to find the pot empty — or worse, you arrived just after the last cup had been served. For researchers fueled by coffee, it was a small tragedy repeated ten times a day.

In 1991, two of them, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, had a disarmingly simple idea. They pointed a camera at the coffee maker, connected it to the lab’s internal network and wrote a small program that displayed, in a corner of the screen, a gray image 128 pixels square, refreshed several times a minute. The program was called XCoffee. From then on, before getting up, anyone could check at a glance whether there was still coffee — and even guess from the level whether it was worth waiting for the next pot.

For two years, this little everyday theater remained an internal affair. Then, in 1993, the Web arrived with its first graphical browsers. Two other researchers, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson, had the idea of connecting the famous coffee maker to this brand-new web. Overnight, anyone, anywhere on the planet, could open a page and watch an English coffee maker doing nothing in particular, live. Without knowing it, they had just invented the webcam.

The success was absurd and total. In a world where online images were still rare and slow to load, thousands of internet users got into the habit of peeking at this now-famous percolator. Some curious visitors even made the trip to Cambridge to see “the real thing.” The Trojan Room coffee maker became a small legend of the nascent network — proof, for many, that you could connect any two points on the globe to share a living image, even the most trivial one.

You could laugh at it, and many people did: all that ingenuity to keep an eye on lukewarm coffee. But that criticism misses what happened there. What these researchers discovered without looking for it was that a live feed doesn’t have to be spectacular to be fascinating. Watching a real place continue to exist while you’re somewhere else — knowing that at this very moment, thousands of miles away, something is really happening, even if it’s only a drop falling — touches something very old in us. Here, the mundane was the message.

The story has an ending, and it is a gentle one. On August 22, 2001, the lab moved and the coffee maker was unplugged live, before the eyes of its last viewers. The dented object, descaled a thousand times, was put up for auction on eBay; the German magazine Der Spiegel won it for a little over three thousand pounds, restored it and symbolically switched it back on. Ten years of uninterrupted watching of a percolator had come to an end — but the gesture had already spread everywhere.

Thirty years later, this gesture has become a continent. On Terondo, it’s no longer one webcam but thousands showing, live and free, a Tokyo intersection, a watering hole in the savannah, a sleepy fishing port or a volcano quietly smoking. You can open them without an account, without installing anything, and leave a window running on somewhere else that goes on living its life without us. All of it began, remember, with a coffee maker and two researchers who no longer wanted to climb the stairs for nothing. The biggest windows onto the world sometimes begin with a very small gesture.

← Magazine