The webcam was invented to... film a coffee machine!

In 1991, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a computer science researcher at the Cambridge University laboratory, was working on networking the ATMs of the time (automated teller machines).

He was collaborating with about fifteen researchers working in the same building as him on more or less related projects, and to work for long hours on their research projects, they all consumed large quantities of coffee day and night.

Problem: academic research isn't a world where money flows freely, and most of the budget was invested in the equipment used for the research projects, with only a single coffee machine available for the whole building.

As it seems coffee is always better when freshly made (I wouldn't know, I hate the stuff), the machine had barely finished filling its pot before it was often found empty, to the great despair of researchers who had come down several floors for... nothing.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky then had the idea to connect a camera available in the lab with one of the computers in the "Trojan Room," a room containing test machines connected to the building's network for their research as well as... the coffee machine.

The goal being to transmit the images captured by the camera to all the other researchers in the building, Quentin wrote the client software code (called xcoffee) and Paul wrote the server code (meant to send the camera images over the network).

After a few hours of work, the two researchers managed to broadcast the images from the camera, aimed at the coffee machine, directly onto the network, and every researcher could then see in real-time (at a rate of one grayscale image of 128*128 pixels sent every 20 seconds) the fill level of the machine, and no longer travel for nothing.

At the time, the system ran on an in-house RPC protocol, created specifically for networking the ATMs, and could only work inside the laboratory.

But with the advancement of the internet and the arrival of images in web browsers in 1993, the computer serving as the server was replaced by an Acorn Archimedes, and a web server was installed by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson.

The images of the famous coffee machine were then made public, viewed by hundreds of people all over the world every day, even leading some fans to make a pilgrimage to the university.

At a rate of one image sent every second, day and night (a lamp aimed at the machine had already been installed), the first webcam in the history of computing was born.

The server was stopped on August 22, 2001; below you can see the last image ever transmitted by the camera over the network, a photo showing the fingers of Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson, and Quentin Stafford-Fraser simultaneously pressing the server's shutdown button.

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Most of the information in this article comes from the words and writings of Quentin Stafford-Fraser himself, which you can find in the sources at the very bottom of the article (in English).

I personally find it incredible and fascinating that the evolution of technology and computing is so fast that the inventors of certain technologies that we all use daily can still talk about it during their lifetime.

We are lucky.