If you woke up this morning running to the coffee pot even more aggressively because of the start of Daylight Saving Time, just remember that you’re not alone, and that’s how innovation and technological progress begin.
The world’s first webcam was invented in 1991 to monitor a coffee pot in a computer lab at the University of Cambridge, England:
To save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room, a camera was set up providing a live picture of the coffee pot to all desktop computers on the office network. After the camera was connected to the Internet a few years later, the coffee pot gained international renown as a feature of the fledgling World Wide Web, until being retired in 2001.
See the Wiki here.