The World’s First Livestream: Trojan Room Coffee Pot

Long before YouTube, before Twitch, before livestreams were everywhere, the first webcam pointed at something we’d consider boring by today’s standards: a coffee pot. In this episode, Michael tells the story of how a small convenience in a Cambridge lab changed the internet forever. Then we chat with Comedian Dan Wilbur! Did you know The Internet Says It’s True is now a book? Get it here: https://amzn.to/4miqLNy

It’s the early 1990s. The internet exists, but most people don’t yet realize how it’s going to change everything. If you were online in 1991, your connection probably came through a dial-up modem, a little box that would screech and clack at your phone line before finally connecting you to a world of text-based web pages.

 The World Wide Web was just a couple years old, and only a handful of people in the world really knew what it could do.

Inside the University of Cambridge’s Computer Science Department, people were working on all sorts of experiments that would, over the years, become foundational to the web. These researchers were brilliant, driven, and, like many academics, prone to long hours spent hunched over computers.

And, like many office workers everywhere, they had a small but very real problem: coffee.

The department’s coffee pot sat in a room called the Trojan Room. Nobody knows exactly why it was called that—and trust me, I tried to find out why because that’s the kind of little detail I love to find. I just couldn’t figure it out. It was just the room’s official name in the directory—but it quickly became the center of a small office ritual. Researchers would wander into the Trojan Room for a cup, chat, refill their mugs, and then return to their work. The problem, of course, was that the coffee pot wasn’t always full. Sometimes it was empty.

If you’ve ever walked all the way across an office or a building, only to find that the coffee is gone, you know the feeling: that small disappointment that hits harder when you’ve had a long day. Multiply that by dozens of people making the same trip every day, and you have a cumulative problem that, as small as it seems, was significant enough to inspire a solution.

Two researchers—Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky—decided that there had to be a better way. Rather than building a new coffee machine, or setting a strict refill schedule, they applied the simplest possible solution: they would make it so that nobody had to walk to the coffee pot without knowing if it was full.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser, in particular, had the vision for a tiny bit of office magic. Using an old camera connected to a workstation, he and Paul set up a system that took a still image of the coffee pot every 20 seconds. Then, the image could be pulled up on any computer in the department.

For the first time, someone could sit at their desk and see if there was coffee available. If the pot was full, they could make the walk; if it was empty, they could save themselves the disappointment. That was it. That was the entire point.

And yet, this simple solution—born entirely out of laziness and practicality—would become a historic milestone. It was—in effect—the first webcam in the world.

At the time, nobody expected this coffee pot camera to change the internet. The setup was small, low-resolution (128 by 128 pixels), and only visible on the lab’s local network. It was, for all intents and purposes, a quiet, unassuming tool. But it captured the imagination of the people who saw it. They started to joke about it, to time their coffee runs to avoid disappointment, and to share stories about the mysterious “coffee cam.”

By 1993, the web had started to expand beyond its initial academic and research circles. The World Wide Web was opening up to the public, and people began experimenting with ways to share images and ideas online. That’s when Quentin and a colleague named Martin Johnson decided to take the coffee pot to the next level: they put it online.

Suddenly, anyone in the world could check the coffee pot from their computer. That grainy black-and-white image of a single pot in a tiny room in Cambridge became one of the first live images available on the web. It was, effectively, a global preview of what would become the visual internet.

People were fascinated. Here was a piece of real life, transmitted in near-real-time across oceans and countries, and it was just… a coffee pot. But in its simplicity lay its genius. The concept of “live images online” was no longer hypothetical—it was happening.

Over the next few years, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot became a minor celebrity. It appeared in news articles, academic discussions, and even casual references in tech magazines. People from around the world would check in on it just to see if someone had brewed coffee. The idea that a single image could connect strangers across continents, even in such a mundane way, was captivating.

And it laid the groundwork for the countless live streams, webcams, and video feeds that would follow. Without the coffee pot, we might not have Twitch, baby cam streams, or live feeds from zoos. It was the first time someone had taken something “mundane” and made it interesting through technology—and in doing so, showed the world the possibilities of online streaming.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser has often reflected on the project, calling it unremarkable at the time but acknowledging its historical significance later. “We didn’t think anyone would care outside the department,” he said. “It was just for us, so we didn’t waste our time walking to an empty pot.” That laziness, that small bit of practicality, ended up giving the world a glimpse of the future.

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot isn’t the only story where small annoyances sparked significant inventions. Consider the TV remote: it exists because someone didn’t want to get up to change channels. The garage door opener? Same story. Even sliced bread was revolutionary because it was easier than cutting it yourself.

In Cambridge, the coffee pot just happened to intersect with a moment when technology was ripe for experimentation. The web was young, computer networks were growing, and people were curious. In another time or place, the coffee pot might have remained just a pot. But in that lab, in that city, in those years, it became a tiny historical landmark.

Even in popular culture, the coffee pot’s legacy lives on. It inspired other early webcams—FishCam at USC, FogCam in San Francisco, and many more. Live webcams became a way for people to connect to places they couldn’t otherwise visit, from webcams of baby penguins to city streets around the globe. Today, there are estimated to be over a hundred thousand webcams that are live-streaming and publicly accessible. They’re sharing things like traffic, weather, beach views, wildlife, cityscapes, and more. And it all started with a simple question: “Is there any coffee left?”

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot ran until 2001. By then, it had been broadcasting for nearly a decade. For those ten years, it remained largely unchanged. The images were tiny, grainy, and black-and-white, but the system worked. People checked it daily. It became an office fixture, a tiny piece of continuity in a fast-changing world.

When the department moved to a new building, the coffee pot was left behind. That’s when the world noticed its absence. News outlets reported the retirement of the coffee pot as though it were the end of an era. There was even an obituary published in The Guardian. A coffee pot, it seemed, had more fans than most people expected.

Eventually, it was sold at auction to a German magazine called Der Spiegel, where it became a museum piece of sorts after fetching a price of just over $4,000. The coffee pot itself never brewed another cup, but its legacy lived on, reminding people of the origins of live streaming and online webcams.

It’s easy to underestimate the impact of something so simple. In retrospect, the coffee pot demonstrates how innovation often begins in unexpected places. It shows how curiosity, convenience, and a little bit of laziness can converge to create something that ends up shaping the world.

Today, when you join a video call, watch a livestream, or check a baby monitor remotely, you can trace a direct line back to that grainy image of a coffee pot in a room called the Trojan Room. And the internet says it’s true.