The Trojan Room Coffee Pot Movie

2024-07-11
2m

A short film recounts the story of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, one of the world’s first webcams, and the images it captured before disappearing.

This short film by Quentin Stafford‑Fraser, one of the original team members behind the Trojan Room Coffee Pot project, recounts the story of one of the earliest webcams and an unlikely icon of the early World Wide Web.

First set up in 1991 at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, the camera allowed researchers, including Stafford‑Fraser and his colleagues, to check whether the communal coffee pot was full without leaving their desks. When connected to the web in 1993, the live feed became a global curiosity and one of the first continuously updated images available online.

The camera ran for a decade, transmitting millions of images, though almost none were formally saved. In 1996, the newly founded Internet Archive began capturing periodic snapshots of websites, preserving a small number of coffee-pot images. Drawing on these 28 surviving fragments, Stafford-Fraser assembles a visual record spanning 1998 to 2001, culminating in the final moments before the camera was switched off.

The film highlights the fragility of early digital culture and invites reflection on how we preserve the web’s earliest experiments for the future.

A short video telling the story of The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, the worlds first web-cam, which displayed a coffe filter maching at the University of Cambridge computer lab from 1991 to 2001, so that staff could know when fresh coffee had been made. Told through text on screen and the few surviving still images of the web cam broadcast itself.

Online Video

From viral memes to video essays, discover highlights from a new BFI National Archive collection...

First came the Cinema Age, then the TV Age, and now the age of Online Video. Digital film created for distribution online is today’s most dynamic, influential screen form. Encompassing much that’s new, from ASMR and Unboxing Videos to Twitch streaming and TikTok twerking, it’s also breathed new life into older film forms, filling our screens with fresh takes on advertising, journalism, satire, public information, campaigning, training and much else that’s been with us since time immemorial, and variously taking the forms of comedy, drama, documentary and animation. It’s become embedded into every aspect of UK (and world) society.

This unique collection of 50 online videos combines iconic highlights of British online video with other examples chosen to illustrate that sheer diversity. All were acquired by the BFI National Archive as part of the Lottery funded Our Screen Heritage programme. Our thanks to the Lottery, and lottery ticket buyers nationwide. for their support of this vital collecting and preservation work.