This article from BBC Technology says the first webcam was at the University of Cambidge.
“As computer geeks at the University of Cambridge beavered away on research projects at the cutting edge of technology, one piece of equipment was indispensable to the entire team – the coffee percolator. One of the things that’s very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine,” explains Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser.
But the problem for scientists was that the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab, known as the Trojan room, and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on different floors.”
“To solve the problem, he and another research scientist, Dr Paul Jardetzky, rigged up a camera to monitor the Trojan room coffee pot. The camera would grab images three times a minute, and they wrote software that would allow researchers in the department to run the images from the camera on their internal computer network.”
No doubt, this enabled them check the coffee pot without having to zip up.