The first webcam in the world was born from the desire of computer science students at Cambridge University, England, for fresh coffee. Having only a single coffee pot situated at some distance from the computer labs meant that a freshly brewed supply soon ran out. To overcome this difficulty Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky had the idea of focusing a camera on the coffee pot.
A computer with a simple frame grabber was connected to a camera, which was focused on the coffee pot. Jardetzky wrote a server program that collected images from the camera every three minutes, while Stafford-Fraser developed the software to run on the computers of all the members of the "Trojan Room coffee club." Connecting to the server then provided an up-to-date, icon-sized image of the pot on-screen. The camera was connected to the Internet in 1993 and became a popular symbol of the early World Wide Web. When the webcam was finally switched off in August 2001, the international media covered the event and the original Krups coffee pot was auctioned for a significant sum on eBay.
The current longest running webcam in the world is Fogcam, which has been broadcasting from San Francisco State University since 1994. The camera was set up by students Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong to capture images of daily life on campus, and still relays images from the front of the humanities building.
Webcam technology took off across the Internet after the pornography industry began to show an interest. The industry employed a Dutch developer to write software that could provide live images without the need for any web plug-ins and so the "live streaming webcam" was developed.
