Imagine inventing a technology that would later help millions of people attend virtual meetings, communicate with loved ones, and work remotely; all because someone wanted to know whether coffee was available! Believe it or not, one of the earliest webcams was created to monitor a coffee pot. Here is the fascinating story behind this unusual technological invention. How It All Started In 1991, researchers working at the University of Cambridge in England faced a small but annoying problem. Their laboratory had a coffee pot, but checking whether it contained coffee required them to leave their desks and walk to the room where it was kept. To solve this problem, the researchers set up a camera to capture images of the coffee pot. They used computer technology to make these images available to colleagues on their internal computer network. This simple idea allowed researchers to check the coffee pot from their computer screens without making unnecessary trips. From Coffee Monitoring...
The World is stranger than you think.