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Walk into Caffè Reggio on Macdougal Street in Manhattan and the first thing you notice, against the back wall, is a great brass and chrome contraption that looks like it belongs in a cathedral. It was built in 1902. It has been standing in that room since 1927, when Domenico Parisi bought it and opened the place, and it is probably the oldest espresso machine in New York.
Most coffee pots live quiet lives and end up at the back of a cupboard. A few end up in the historical record instead, usually by accident. One of them became the reason the webcam exists. One of them stopped a motorway. And one of them has been sitting in a Greenwich Village café for nearly a century while the world walked past it.
The Trojan Room coffee pot, and the first webcam
The computer laboratory at the University of Cambridge had one coffee pot and several floors of researchers, and the researchers kept climbing the stairs to find it empty. In 1991 two of them, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, decided to fix the problem the way computer scientists fix problems.
They pointed a camera at the pot. It produced a 128 by 128 pixel greyscale image, captured through a video card on an Acorn Archimedes and pushed onto the lab’s internal network. Stafford-Fraser wrote the client, which he called XCoffee; Jardetzky wrote the server. Anyone at a desk could now glance at a tiny grey picture of the pot and decide whether the walk was worth it.
That was a local convenience for two years. What made it famous came in November 1993, when web browsers had just learned to display images and two colleagues, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson, connected the feed to the web over HTTP. A camera pointed at a kettle in Cambridge became visible to anyone on earth with a browser, and it became the world’s first webcam almost as a side effect of somebody not wanting to climb the stairs.
People watched it. Millions of them, over the years, checking the level of coffee in a pot they would never drink from, in a building they would never enter, in a country most of them had never visited. There is something perfect about the fact that the first thing humanity chose to livestream was a kitchen appliance doing nothing.
It ended at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001, when the lab moved to the William Gates Building and someone switched the server off. The final frame shows three fingers reaching toward the switch. The shutdown made the front pages of The Times and The Washington Post, and was covered by The Guardian and Wired, which tells you how strange and beloved the thing had become.
The machine itself, a Krups and the last of four or five that had stood in that spot over the decade, went to auction on eBay and sold for £3,350 to the German news outlet Der Spiegel. And here is the part the story usually leaves out: Krups employees then refurbished it, for nothing, on their own time. It was switched back on in the magazine’s editorial office, and it brewed coffee again.
The Mickey coffee pot, which beat a motorway
In 1858 two tinsmith brothers, Julius and Samuel Mickey, built an enormous tin coffee pot and put it outside their shop on South Main Street in what is now Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was advertising, in an age before signage was regulated, and it worked. The pot became a landmark, then a meeting point, then a symbol of the town’s hospitality.
Standing at the kerb turned out to be dangerous. Wagons clipped it for decades, and in 1920 a car hit it hard enough that city officials decided the thing was both a safety hazard and illegal advertising, and moved to stop it being restored at all. The town objected loudly enough that the pot went back up, this time on a post set further from the road.
Then in 1959 the route of Interstate 40 was laid straight through the tin shop’s location. This is the point where most local landmarks quietly disappear. Instead the pot was moved, and moved again in the 1960s when Old Salem Road was built and the junctions were redrawn. It now stands in a traffic island at the north end of Old Salem, and it belongs to the City of Winston-Salem.
A tin advertisement built by two brothers has now outlasted their shop, the wagons, the car that hit it, and the original road layout of an American city. Local legend adds that a Civil War soldier once hid inside it, though which side he was on depends entirely on who is telling you.
The La Pavoni at Caffè Reggio
Domenico Parisi opened Caffè Reggio at 119 Macdougal Street in 1927 with a second-hand Italian espresso machine built in 1902, and it is credited with introducing Italian cappuccino to America. The café was among the first places in the country where you could order one.
It is worth pausing on how early that is. Cappuccino did not reach mainstream America until the specialty coffee wave of the 1980s and 1990s, when Seattle turned espresso drinks into a national habit. Parisi was serving them in Greenwich Village more than half a century before that, to an audience that mostly had no idea what they were drinking.
The machine never left. It sits against the back wall, no longer pulling shots, ornate in a way modern equipment simply is not, all polished brass and eagles and levers. The café around it became a Village institution: John F. Kennedy made a campaign speech outside in 1959, and the room has appeared in The Godfather Part II, Serpico and Inside Llewyn Davis, among many others. There is a bench inside that came from a Medici palazzo, and nobody stops you sitting on it.
La Pavoni, incidentally, is still in business and still makes lever machines that work on the same principle, which is a rarer kind of continuity than it sounds. You can buy a modern one and pull a shot with the same motion.
Why any of this sticks
None of these objects were designed to matter. A lab kettle, a shop sign and a second-hand import are about as ordinary as objects get. They became landmarks because of what happened around them, which is generally how landmarks work.
The Cambridge pot is the one that gets remembered, and rightly, because the webcam turned out to be a genuinely consequential invention and it began with mild irritation about stairs. But the one that moves me is the Krups engineers refurbishing that battered machine for free so it could go on making coffee in a newsroom in Hamburg. Somebody could have put it in a display case. They plugged it back in instead.
If you want more of this sort of thing, our piece on coffee commercials from the past covers the adverts that lodged in a generation’s memory, and the story of Juan Valdez is about a coffee farmer who never existed at all.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Trojan Room coffee pot?
A coffee machine in the University of Cambridge computer laboratory that became the subject of the world’s first webcam in 1991, and was visible over the web from November 1993 until it was switched off in August 2001.
Who invented the first webcam?
Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky built the original camera and software in 1991. Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson put the feed on the web in November 1993.
What happened to the Trojan Room coffee pot?
It sold on eBay for £3,350 to Der Spiegel, was refurbished free of charge by Krups employees, and was switched on again in the magazine’s editorial office.
Where is the Winston-Salem coffee pot now?
In a traffic island at the north end of Old Salem, where Old Salem Road meets Main Street. It is owned by the City of Winston-Salem.
Is the espresso machine at Caffè Reggio still used?
No. The 1902 machine is displayed against the back wall rather than operated, but it is still there and you can go and look at it.
Discussion 1
I have loved that espresso machine at Caffe Reggio since the 1950s. It is the reason I don’t buy an espresso machine for the home: if I can’t have one like that, I don’t want one at all.