It is well known that necessity is the mother of all inventions, and this truth also applies to first webcam of history, the Trojan Room Coffee Potinvented in 1991 by Quentin Stafford Fraser And Paul Jardetzkytwo researchers from the Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. As the name of the invention suggests, the world’s first webcam had to do with coffee, and it was created because the two researchers didn’t want to waste a trip to the coffee maker if it was empty when they arrived.
We are in the 1991in the university computer lab known to all students as the “Trojan Room”. Between one experiment and another, the group of researchers had only one thought: to get a nice cup of coffee. The joke was that in that area of the campus there was only one coffee machine, and everyone fought over it. Often they made empty trips from staircase to staircase only to find that there was not even a drop left, in total despair.
One evening two of them, Stafford Fraser And Jardetzkytired of making fruitless trips asked themselves: but how do we solve this problem? With technology! So they mounted a camera on a support, pointing it at the coffee machine. The camera in turn was connected to one of the PCs in the laboratory, and showed on the screen a 120×120 pixel image (not in color) of the coffee maker at random frame per secondallowing researchers to see how much coffee was left from the comfort of their computer screens and without having to climb stairs. The software written by Stafford-Fraser was later renamed XCoffee.
In November 1993, the Cambridge coffee maker landed on the web thanks to two other coffee-loving scientists, Daniel Gordon And Martyn Johnsonand that’s how the “Trojan Room Coffee Pot” became the first webcam in history.
You might be wondering: who cared how much caffeine was left in that little lab outside the Trojan Room in Cambridge? Well, a lot of people did! The webcam went viral among geeks around the world, and more than 2 million people They checked the level of the remaining coffee at least once a day. It even reached an email from Japan in which they asked if it was possible to leave a light on during the night, so that the coffee level could be seen even in such different time zones.
But even the popular coffee maker had to go to pension: on August 22, 2001, the last image transmitted by the historic webcam appeared, while a hand was turning off the system. After all, the software was old by then, and researchers had long wanted to get rid of the computer to which the camera was connected.
The coffee machine was so famous that even though it was no longer in service it was awarded to the German newspaper The Mirror (whose editorial staff used it for a while) at an auction on eBay, bringing in £3,350 to the researchers who probably used that money to buy a much more modern one. The end of an era, certainly, but one that had opened the doors to one of the most purchased devices in the world: the webcam.
