The World's First Webcam

You'd have probably made use of the webcam feature on your computer or the webcam device in one or more activities.

Well, the first webcam resulted from monitoring the jar of coffee in an office as nobody wanted to waste his or her time leaving their offices and arriving at the coffee jar bar to meet an empty jar.

In 1991, a team of computer scientists in the University of Cambridge invented the world's first webcam to keep an eye on coffee levels from their desks. The camera stood near the coffee jar, the camera provided a 129×129 pixel grayscale image of the coffee pot, at 1 frame per second.

This development enabled students and academics keep an eye on the coffee level, by opening up the xcoffee stream on their desktop, to ensure they never had a wasted journey. (Incidentally, it's unclear who ever actually made the coffee, but let's not spoil a perfect story.)

After the invention of the web, this image was dominant on the web and became the official startup for webcams.