Although webcams, which have become of interest to almost everyone with the global epidemic, are used for gaming sessions, remote business meetings and many other purposes, their first use focused on coffee in a much more interesting way.
The first webcam live broadcast actually came about by chance. Called the “Trojan Room Pot,” the first images were, as you might guess from the name, a live feed of a coffee pot and were not even online to begin with.
“It all started in the dark days of 1991, when the World Wide Web was just a gleam in CERN’s eye,” writes computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser, who implemented the coffee pot camera with fellow researcher Paul Jardetzky.
In his 1995 coffee pot bio, he says: “I was working on ATM networks in a section of the Computer Lab known as the Troy Room. There were about fifteen of us involved in relevant research, and being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one common filter coffee machine, and that was in the hallway just outside the Troy Room.”
However, this was a problem because coffee was a lifeblood for those working in the academic world. When there was only one pot for an entire department, it was inevitable that some people would go without coffee.
“Some lived in other parts of the building and had to climb several flights of stairs to get to the pot,” says Stafford-Fraser. “It was often a fruitless journey, as the Troy Room’s all-nighters ran out of coffee.”
They realized that without intervention the entire future of computer science could be damaged, and thus the XCoffee program was born.
Xcoffee was sending images like this.“We mounted a camera on the coffee stand, pointed it at the coffee maker in the hallway, and ran underground cables all the way to the frame grabber in the Troy Room,” Stafford-Fraser explains. “Jardetzky then scanned images of the pot running on the machine at various resolutions every few seconds.” “He wrote a ‘server’ program that pulls the machine, and I wrote a ‘client’ program that connects to the server, which anyone can run, and which displays an icon-sized image of the machine in the corner of the screen.”
Troy Room Teapot meets the internet
But the Troy Chamber Teapot didn’t truly take its place in internet history until November 1993. At the time, another caffeine-hungry computer scientist, Martyn Johnson, who was not connected to Cambridge’s internal servers and therefore unable to run XCoffee, first brought the pioneering program online.
“I built a little command line around the captured images,” he said in a 2012 interview with the BBC. “The first version was probably just 12 lines of code, probably less; and just copied the latest image to the client each time it was requested.”
According to Stafford-Fraser, the photo of the coffee pot was updated only three times a minute, but since it was already filling slowly, this update frequency was more than enough. Additionally, the images were in black and grayscale, but since coffee was in similar tones, this was not a problem either. The Troy Room Coffee Pot went viral in the early ’90s, and enthusiasts around the world tuned in to check out the status of the Cambridge researchers’ caffeine reserves.
Unfortunately, the fame of the teapot and the bow did not last long. If you try to connect to the stream today, you’ll be greeted with an apology note stating that the webcam is no longer broadcasting. The last image of the historic program was sent on Wednesday, August 22, 2001 at 09:54 UTC.
The termination of this publication was due to practical reasons as much as its creation. “The software was becoming completely unsustainable,” Johnson said in an interview with the BBC. “Research software is not always of the highest quality and we just wanted to throw away the machines that supported it.”
The Troy Chamber Teapot, which is no longer in active service, was sold via an online auction, fetching Computer Science department researchers an impressive £3,350.
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