'World's oldest webcam' switched off: Cameras that have made history

The web cam started in 1994 and used the early webpage style

The world's oldest streaming camera has finally been turned off after 25 years - that's a quarter of a century!

The Fogcam was first used in 1994 to watch how the weather changed at the San Francisco State University campus.

Ex-students Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong originally set up the webcam, and said it would be shut down on the 30 August, as there were now no good places to put it.

Jeff said it was getting harder to find safe locations to put the camera so it had a good view of Holloway Avenue.

Here are some other famous cameras that have made history...

The coffee pot camera

Who would have thought a coffee pot would have led to the invention of the web cam?!

A group of scientists at the University of Cambridge were credited with inventing the first web cam in 1993 - and it was all because of a coffee pot!

Many of the scientists worked on different floors in the same building, and when they wanted to get a cup of coffee they had to travel quite far to the main computer room to get a drink.

Sometimes when they would get there the coffee pot would be empty, and this would be very disappointing.

So they decided to set up a camera which would allow people to see when the coffee pot was full or empty to save them making a wasted journey.

On 22 November 1993 the camera made it onto the World Wide Web.

Dr Martyn Johnson couldn't access the coffee camera, so he built some computer code which meant he could watch the video online instead!

And just like that the first webcam was created.

The first picture by a camera

Niepce and Daguerre were the pioneers of photography!

The first camera that was small and portable enough to be practical was invented by Johann Zahn in 1685.

But, it wasn't until over 100 years later that the first photograph was made.

The first semi-successful photograph attempt was taken around 1816 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce.

However, unfortunately the photos he took didn't last forever - and would eventually fade over time. They also took around eight hours to develop!

So, he teamed up with painter and physicist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to help him perfect the process.

Niépce passed away in 1833, but his partner Daguerre continued their experiments, and in 1839 he announced their findings in a big science meeting.

The first camera phone

The Sharp J-SH04 mobile phone from Japan was one of the first mobile phones to have a built-in digital camera

Fast-forward a couple of decades and the first ever mobile phone to have a camera was invented.

There is a bit of debate about whether the first camera phone was made by Samsung, and released in South Korea in June of 2000, or by Sharp and released in Japan in November 2000.

The Samsung SCH-V200 was capable of taking 20 pictures at a quality of 0.35 mega pixels - but it had to be plugged into a computer to see them.

Whereas the Sharp J-SH04 could take pixels at a quality of 0.11 megapixels.

For comparison, the average phone these days can store tens of thousands of photos, at a quality of around 12 megapixels!