Coffee on Cam

The first streaming web cam was used to take live cam pictures of a coffee pot. It was created by scientists at Cambridge University, England, in 1991. The streaming web cam was an experiment using a video capture card and requests from an Internet site. This resulted in a frame of video being transmitted every second. This is a very slow rate compared with modern live cams. Modern streaming web cams transmit at 30 frames per second to produce seamless live video. The streaming video of the Trojan Room coffee pot let scientists in the building know when there was fresh coffee available. This streaming web cam continued to operate until 2001, when it was switched off.