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To save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room, a camera was set up providing a live picture of the coffee pot to all desktop computers ...
And so it was that the grainy images of a rather grubby coffee pot in a university lab were written into computer science folklore, as the first ever webcam.
The world's very first webcam was thought up by highly intelligent, highly caffeinated researchers at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge in England in 1991.
In the early 1990s, long before video calls, live streaming, or 24/7 security surveillance became common, a simple coffee pot at the University of Cambridge played a crucial role in the creation of the first-ever webcam.
The first webcam was used to monitor a coffee pot. It was set up in 1991 by a group of computer scientists at Cambridge University, led by Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky.
When Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser hooked up the world’s first webcam in 1991, it was to check whether the coffee had finished brewing at Cambridge's computer science lab.
The original webcam updated the image of a coffee maker about three times a minute. This camera, known as the world's first webcam, quickly attracted international attention, becoming a symbol of the early Internet.
And thus, the first webcam was born. Using a simple black-and-white camera connected to a computer, the scientists built a system that captured images of the coffee pot at regular intervals. These images were then tra...
Computer scientists at Cambridge University, UK, were so frustrated with trekking down the corridor only to find that the coffee pot was empty, that they rigged up a camera and a computer so that anyone in the departm...
But after the release of image-displaying web browsers in 1993, it found a much wider audience as the world’s first streaming webcam. Stafford-Fraser’s successors “resurrected the system, treated it to a n...
