This Camera Has Taken a Photo Every 20 Seconds Since 1994

A camera at San Francisco State University has taken a photo every 20 seconds since 1994, capturing decades of change and fog.

Key Takeaways

FogCam is the oldest continuously operating webcam, running since 1994 without interruption.
It captures and overwrites images every 20 seconds, preserving only fleeting moments of San Francisco's environment.
The webcam’s endurance highlights the impermanence of most online content and the rarity of digital longevity.
Public interest and cultural value can arise even from simple, seemingly mundane technology.
The project demonstrates how live images create a sense of place and continuity over decades.

What the video covers

Since 1994, a camera named FogCam at San Francisco State University has taken a photo every 20 seconds, pointing at a sidewalk, trees, and fog.
The camera was created by two graduate students, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong, inspired by the famous Trojan Room coffee pot webcam.
FogCam became the oldest continuously operating webcam after the original coffee pot cam was switched off in 2001.
The camera has moved locations several times on campus and is maintained mostly by its creators without official university endorsement until 2019.
FogCam overwrites each photo every 20 seconds, keeping no images, with only a few frames preserved by the Internet Archive.
In 2019, when the creators planned to shut it down, public outcry led San Francisco State University to officially adopt and continue the project.
Despite its simplicity and lack of dramatic content, FogCam symbolizes stability and continuity in an ever-changing internet landscape.
The video reflects on the impermanence of the web and the significance of enduring digital artifacts like FogCam.
FogCam captures the slow changes of the cityscape, the growth of trees, and the recurring fog, acting as a digital pulse.
The video is part of the Left Running series, focusing on machines that have never been turned off.

Chapters

What is FogCam and why is it significant?

FogCam is a webcam at San Francisco State University that has taken a photo every 20 seconds since 1994, making it the oldest continuously operating webcam. It captures a view of trees, a sidewalk, and fog, symbolizing digital endurance and the impermanence of most online content.

Who created FogCam and what inspired it?

FogCam was created by graduate students Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong as a final project inspired by the Trojan Room coffee pot webcam, one of the first live webcams on the internet, which showed a coffee pot to avoid wasted trips.

Why did San Francisco State University take over FogCam in 2019?

When the creators planned to shut down FogCam in 2019 due to lack of support and suitable locations, public outcry and media coverage led the university to officially adopt and continue the project, recognizing its cultural and historical value.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

This photo was taken twenty seconds ago. This one, forty-three seconds before that. There's a camera in a window at San Francisco State University. It's pointed at a sidewalk, some trees, and, most days, a wall of fog. Every twenty seconds it takes a picture.

Speaker A

Then it uploads it, overwrites the last one, and keeps nothing. It has been doing this since September 30th, 1994.

Speaker A

Almost nothing on the internet is left from 1994. This is the story of the thing that is.

Speaker A

In 1994, the World Wide Web has a few thousand sites on it. Total. There is no Google. There is no YouTube. If you're online at all, you're probably on a university connection, staring at grey pages in a browser called Mosaic. At San Francisco State, two graduate students

Speaker A

are finishing a master's degree in instructional technology, the study of how machines can help people learn. Jeff Schwartz, screen name Webdog. Dan Wong, screen name Danno. They need a final project. And for reasons that will make sense in a moment,

Speaker A

they've been thinking about a coffee pot. Three years earlier, computer scientists at Cambridge had gotten tired of walking down the hall to an empty coffee machine. So they pointed a camera at the pot, and piped the picture to their screens. In 1993 they put that feed on

Speaker A

the brand-new web, and the Trojan Room coffee pot became, arguably, the first thing on the internet you could watch. Millions of people checked in on a coffee pot, in a building they would never visit. Nobody could quite explain why. Schwartz and Wong understood the why,

Speaker A

and they understood the thing underneath the why, a live picture, any live picture, makes a place real. So they got a Connectix QuickCam, the little grey golf-ball camera that had just come out, wired it to a Macintosh, and pointed it out a window of Burk Hall.

Speaker A

The image was tiny. Under three hundred twenty pixels wide. Greyish. Smeared. And this being San Francisco, there was one thing the camera could absolutely be counted on to capture, most mornings, on schedule. So they named it FogCam.

Speaker A

September 30th, 1994. They switched it on. Here's what happens next, in the world around the camera. Netscape goes public. Google is founded. The dot-com bubble inflates, and in the same city, outside that window, it bursts. Friendster. MySpace. Facebook. The iPhone. Everything on the internet gets faster,

Speaker A

sharper, louder... and dies younger. And every twenty seconds, a camera at San Francisco State takes a picture of some trees. In August 2001, Cambridge finally switched off the coffee pot cam, and auctioned the pot. And on that day, with no announcement, and no ceremony,

Speaker A

FogCam quietly became the oldest webcam on Earth, a title Guinness would make official in 2008.

Speaker A

It wasn't glamorous. Over the years, the camera has had at least six different homes, squatting wherever the university would let it. Burk Hall. The student health center. A stretch where it watched the espresso line at Cafe Rosso, which Schwartz admits was a tribute to the

Speaker A

coffee pot. Students used it for exactly two things, checking how long the coffee line was, and hunting for parking. The creators kept it alive on their own time. Schwartz put it this way: "The university tolerates us. They don't really endorse us."

Speaker A

And remember, it keeps nothing. Every picture overwrites the last one. A quarter century of San Francisco, photographed, and immediately destroyed, three times a minute.

Speaker A

The only frames that survive... are accidents. Every so often, the Internet Archive's crawler happened to wander past, and save whatever the camera saw at that moment. A few frames a year. That's all that's left. I collected them. Two decades of leftovers,

Speaker A

from a camera that keeps nothing. Watch the trees grow. Watch the cars change shape, decade by decade. Often the same window. Always... the same fog.

Speaker A

On August 18th, 2019, after twenty-five years, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong posted a short announcement, FogCam would shut down on August 30th. They were done.

Speaker A

There was nowhere good left to point it, and no real support to keep it going. We felt it was time to let it go, Schwartz told SFGate. They expected nothing. A shrug. It's a webcam.

Speaker A

Instead, the obituaries started. Tech sites. Newspapers. Radio. The story went around the world, the internet's oldest webcam is dying. People who had never once looked at FogCam were suddenly, genuinely sad about it. The New York Times ran a headline you'd normally

Speaker A

reserve for an endangered species: California University Steps In, to Save Beloved Webcam. That headline is the ending spoiled, by the way. Because that's exactly what happened and it took ten days. August 28th, two days before the deadline, San Francisco State announced

Speaker A

it would take FogCam over. The university that had tolerated it for twenty-five years finally, officially, wanted it. It never went dark. It's up right now. New home, second floor of the business building. Still every twenty seconds. But sit with the strange part. Nobody watches

Speaker A

this thing. It has no content. Nothing happens. Fog arrives. Fog leaves. Why did its death make news on three continents? Here's my best answer. FogCam was never really a picture of a sidewalk. It's a pulse. We don't really like change, and the internet is nothing

Speaker A

but change. Everything you love gets redesigned, sold off, or shut down. And then there's this one small camera, looking at the same city, the same way, for thirty-one years. You don't check on a heartbeat. You just want it to be there. And it's nice... that something still is.

Speaker A

A researcher at Pew went looking at what survives online. Of all the webpages that existed in 2013, not 1994... 2013, roughly four in ten are already gone. Just gone. The web is the most impermanent thing we've ever built. And we put our whole lives on it.

Speaker A

Its oldest camera has spent thirty-one years pointed at the one thing in San Francisco that never changes. The fog comes in. The fog goes out. The picture overwrites the picture.

Speaker A

The two students who built it went on with their lives. The camera they switched on is now older than Google, older than half the people reading the comments under this video. The camera doesn't know that. It doesn't know it holds a world record.

Speaker A

It doesn't know it almost died in 2019, or that strangers on other continents wrote eulogies for it. It knows one thing.

Speaker A

It took a picture twenty seconds ago, and it's about to take another. Left Running is a series about machines nobody turned off. There are more of them out there than you'd think. Subscribe, and I'll show you the rest.

Topics:FogCamwebcam historySan Francisco State Universityinternet historyoldest webcamdigital preservationinternet impermanencelive cameraTrojan Room coffee potLeft Running series

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