The world's first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot

A small grainy black and white image of a glass coffee pot on a hotplate inside an old computer window titled xcoffee — The coffee pot as seen in the XCoffee program. Image: Quentin Stafford-Fraser, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (enlarged)

In 1991, about fifteen researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory shared a single filter coffee machine. It stood in a corridor just outside a room called the Trojan Room. For anyone working there, that was convenient. For coffee-club members elsewhere in the building, it meant climbing several flights of stairs, often to find the pot empty.

So they did what computer scientists do. They solved the problem with a computer.

The coffee crisis

"One of the things that's very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine," one of the researchers, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, later told the BBC.

He and a colleague, Paul Jardetzky, salvaged a video camera and fixed it to a laboratory stand, pointing at the pot. Jardetzky wrote a program to grab pictures from the camera. Stafford-Fraser wrote another, called XCoffee, that showed the picture in a small window on the screens of anyone in the research group. The whole thing took about a day to build.

The picture was tiny, blurry and in black and white. It updated only about three times a minute. As Stafford-Fraser put it, that "was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee".

Now anyone in the building could glance at their screen and see whether it was worth the walk. "It was either an empty coffee pot, or a full one," Stafford-Fraser said, "or in more exciting moments, maybe a half-full coffee pot and then you'd have to try and guess if it was going up or down."

Modern concrete and glass buildings on a narrow street in central Cambridge — The former Computer Laboratory tower on the New Museums Site in central Cambridge. The Trojan Room was in the neighbouring Arup Building. Photo: Ben Harris, 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

Onto the web

At that point, it was not yet a webcam. In 1991 the World Wide Web barely existed, and web browsers could not even show pictures. The camera was only on the lab's own network.

That changed in 1993, when browsers learned to display images. In November that year, two other members of the lab, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson, connected the coffee camera to the web. Now anyone in the world could see the Cambridge coffee pot. Guinness World Records lists it as the first webcam.

Johnson remembered that the first version was "probably only 12 lines of code, probably less".

The most famous coffee pot in the world

People were fascinated. Visitors from around the world logged on, not to watch anything happen, but simply because they could. By 1995, Stafford-Fraser estimated that hundreds of thousands of people had looked at it, "making it undoubtedly the most famous in the world. I don't think the coffee's any better, though."

The lab's own counts later passed a million and then two million hits. Cambridge's tourist information office even had to direct visitors from America to the lab to see it for themselves. The pot even made it into newspapers and onto radio.

Switched off

In 2001 the Computer Laboratory moved to a new building in West Cambridge, and the team decided it was time to retire the camera. The news made the front pages. "You want to know the secret of getting attention these days?" Stafford-Fraser wrote. "Switch it off."

The last picture was taken at 10.54 on the morning of Wednesday 22 August 2001. It shows the fingers of Gordon, Johnson and Stafford-Fraser on the power switch of the computer that had been capturing the images.

A tiny blurry black and white image showing fingers on a switch, enlarged so the pixels are visible — The last image the webcam ever captured, on 22 August 2001: the fingers of the three men pressing the off switch. Image: Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson and Quentin Stafford-Fraser, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (enlarged)

Sold on eBay

Earlier that month, the lab's coffee club had auctioned the coffee pot itself on eBay to raise money for coffee facilities in the new building. It was a Krups machine and it was broken. It sold for £3,350 to the German news website Spiegel Online.

"The only coffee maker we can find on the web that costs that much is the one we've just sold!" said Tim Hill, who organised the sale.

It was not quite the original. The lab had gone through several identical pots over the years, and this was the longest-serving one, which had been in use from 1997 until it broke in 2001. Spiegel had it repaired and used it in its office. Since 2016 it has been on display at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, in Germany, with a webcam pointed at it.

Stafford-Fraser is often described as the man who invented the webcam. He disagrees. "This is not really justified," he wrote. "At least, I certainly didn't do it single-handed! But I was part of the team that did."

Odd, and entirely British.

More Inventions →

A black NeXT computer and monitor in a glass case, with a torn label on the computer reading "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!", next to a printed proposal and an open old book

Inventions1989

A Londoner invented the web, and his boss called it "vague but exciting"

In March 1989 a British software engineer at CERN handed his boss a proposal for keeping track of information. His boss wrote "Vague but exciting…" on it. Four years later, CERN gave the result away: the World Wide Web.

5 min read

Two cash machines set into a stone wall, one painted gold, with a small commemorative plaque beside them

Inventions1967

The cash machine was born in Enfield, and it ran on "radioactive cheques"

On 27 June 1967 a sitcom star took £10 out of a wall in north London. The machine that paid him used special cheques that, its inventor said, were laced with carbon-14. And his wife is why your PIN has four digits.

4 min read

Painting of eight men, most in dark suits, gathered around a table examining a skull, with a portrait of Charles Darwin on the wall behind them

Crime & Mysteries1912

The "missing link" from Sussex that fooled scientists for 40 years

In 1912 a Sussex solicitor unveiled a skull that seemed half man and half ape. It took scientists more than 40 years to prove it was a fake, and over a century to be fairly sure who made it.