What the webcam has to do with coffee
24/8/2025
Translation: Elicia Payne
What happens when a couple of students want to know whether the coffee pot’s full, but are too lazy to check for themselves? That’s right, the webcam’s born!
These days, we take computer peripherals such as keyboards, mice, speakers and webcams for granted. Yet, there’s a interesting story behind webcams in particular, that, if anything tells us laziness spurs inventions.
Long before the days of working from home and video calls, the PC camera was originally invented for a completely different purpose. Let’s take a look back at how it all began:
Coffee for students
It’s 1991 and Paul Jardetzky and Quentin Stafford-Fraser are studying at the University of Cambridge. As well as having a shared interest in coding, the two also share a love of fresh coffee. The problem? The communal coffee machine in the Trojan Room of the old computer lab is located at the other end of the campus.
As if the long journey isn’t bad enough, in the worst case, they get there to find an empty coffee pot. The solution? The two budding software engineers set up a small, digital black-and-white camera in the Trojan Room with a view of the machine. They add some home-made hardware and software, et voilà: the first webcam is born.
From this day on, all students at the University of Cambridge can access the camera via the local network and check the coffee level before they embark on the long journey.
However, the camera wasn’t actually connected to the World Wide Web – as the name suggests – until two years later by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. From November 1993, the whole world could stare into the coffee pot.
From student shenanigans to global sensation
In the years to come, the webcam from Cambridge would become famous. The live feed of the coffee pot became a highly frequented hotspot of the early internet because as stated on Wikipedia it «demonstrated both the purpose and the banality of the new World Wide Web» (article in German).
Source: Quentin Stafford-Fraser
The webcam was in operation for a whole ten years before it was switched off and taken offline at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001 – an event that caused a stir and even made headlines. Still, the now-famous coffee machine was auctioned off on eBay to the news platform Spiegel Online in the end (article in German). For a total of 10,452.70 German marks. Converted and adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to roughly CHF 6,000 today.
By the way, the first commercially available webcam wasn’t the one from Cambridge, but a QuickCam, which was still made by Connectix at the time. The very first model was developed there in 1994 and wasn’t even originally called a «webcam». This only came later, when the brand was acquired by Logitech in 1998. By then, most of us were familiar with the now archaic QuickCam.
From the webcam’s point of view
The «coffee cam» was definitely a pioneer on the internet. To this day, webcam livestreams of the craziest things go viral. One of my favourites is the last McDonald’s order from Iceland, after the fast food giant closed its only remaining branch there in 2009. What was also entertaining was the lettuce head, which actually managed to stay on a webcam stream longer than former British Prime Minister Liz Truss was in office.
Source: Daily Star
On the other hand, webcams can of course be found at every tourist hotspot around the globe.
In a way, the coffee pot from Cambridge could even be considered the great-grandfather of all Twitch streamers, who now reach an audience of millions every day. Or simply as a curious piece of internet culture and the birth of the webcam.
Header image: Dayan Pfammatter
Dayan Pfammatter
Freelance Editor
pf.dayan@gmail.comI've been fascinated by all things keys, displays and speakers for basically as long as I can remember. As a journalist specialising in technology and society, I strive to create order in the jungle of tech jargon and confusing spec sheets.
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