#mademyday: Coffee and the Internet in 1991

Do you love the internet and cameras? Well, did you know that these two things are actually connected in a way you might not have expected? In 1991, a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge in England had a problem...

In 1991, a group of brilliant but caffeine-starved scientists at Cambridge University had a problem: They kept running out of coffee in their Trojan Room. It happened frequently that the coffee pot was empty and no one noticed until they went to make a cup and found an empty pot. This was a crisis that had to be solved.

The world's first webcam was born. These clever scientists decided to install a webcam on the coffee pot and connect it to the Internet (developed by researchers at CERN in the late 1960s) so that people could check the status of the coffee pot from any computer. This meant that people no longer had to waste precious time and energy walking all the way to the coffee pot to find that it was empty.

The coffee pot webcam quickly gained popularity and became one of the first examples of using the Internet for streaming video. People tuned in just to see if there was still coffee in the pot, and it became something of a novelty. However, the real significance of the coffee pot webcam goes beyond its role as a silly distraction. It was one of the first examples of the Internet being used for something practical, and not just as a communication tool.

This practical use of the Internet was a key factor in its growth in the 1990s. Before the coffee pot webcam, the Internet was mainly used by researchers and academics. But the webcam showed that the Internet could be used for more than just communication and research. It showed that the Internet can be used for something as essential as controlling the coffee pot.