Trojan Room Coffee Pot Camera Set Up at Cambridge

The humble coffee pot sparked a technological revolution when computer scientists at the University of Cambridge invented the world’s first webcam. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky built the internal XCoffee camera system in 1991 to monitor the elusive coffee levels in the Trojan Room, their lab’s main computer room. Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson later rebuilt it with a new frame grabber and put the images on the World Wide Web on 22 November 1993, making it the first webcam. From the commonplace coffee pot, an era of video chats and live webcasts emerged, forever altering human-machine communication and interaction.