From coffee pots to Mount Everest: The webcam turns 20

By Christina Horsten Nov 20, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Cambridge, Britain - It all started with an old filter coffee machine which Quentin Stafford-Fraser recalls made pretty bad coffee.

Regardless, its picture went around the world. Stafford-Fraser and his colleagues in the computer lab of the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at the household appliance at the end of 1991 and sent three times per minute a blurred, greyish image of the machine to a laboratory colleague's screen.

'Finally, many colleagues no longer had to run down three floors to find an empty coffee pot,' said Stafford-Fraser. It was a small step for him and his colleagues - so small that they cannot even remember the exact date - but it was a big step for computer technology. The webcam was invented.

The only catch was that only Stafford-Fraser and his colleagues could follow the level of coffee in the coffee pot with their self-written software. Only after the internet browser started showing pictures two years later could the world look in the so-called 'Trojan Room.'

'Back then there was not really that much on the internet. But us crazy people in Cambridge pointed a very expensive camera onto a very cheap coffee machine and it just fascinated people,' said Stafford-Fraser today. 'And then the whole thing got popular.'

Soon people from around the world were knocking on the door of the lab after asking the tourist information in Cambridge where they could find the 'coffee machine camera.' 'And we got complaints from people in other time zones that they could not see the pictures when it was night in Great Britain. So we had to put a lamp there which would illuminate the coffee machine at all times,' said Stafford-Fraser.

Today, the most-photographed coffee machine in the world belongs to the German news portal Spiegel Online. It has just moved with the editorial team into the new publishing house in the Hamburg Hafencity district, where soon it will be able to be viewed via webcam once again.

Eventually the webcam began to be mass-produced, became established and affordable throughout the world - whether that was on the South Pacific island Bora-Bora, the South Pole, in the Vatican and simply on someone's garden fence.

'The webcam brings the real world into the virtual room,' said communications scientist Sabrina Misoch from the University of Mannheim in Germany. 'It has entirely changed interpersonal communication on the web. Business conferences and private telephone conversations have become more personable, more direct and less anonymous.'

Thanks to webcams, grandmas and grandpas can use video calls via Skype to see their children grow up in a far-off land. A camera atop Mount Everest shows mountain climbers even before they reach the summit. 'In essence, you don't have to leave the house any more since the invention of the webcam,' said Misoch. 'It was an unbelievable turning point.'

The medium offers limitless possibilities, including some controversial ones, such as 'sex cams' which offer live stripteases or public surveillance cameras. 'Because the cameras are so small, they are naturally perfectly suited for surveillance. But that also crossed the border because I can no longer choose who observes me,' said Misoch.

The very first webcam meanwhile has long been shut off. It transmitted its last picture to the world on 22 August 2001. It was still blurred and grayish as Stafford-Fraser and his colleagues were seen shutting off the computer.

'I often joke around that I worked in that research group for more than a year and the only real part of the work I can remember is the coffee machine camera. And I only worked on that for one afternoon,' said Stafford-Fraser. 'But lots of good things emerge like that, when people are just having fun experimenting.'