When Fax was the Future: A Brief History of the Fax Machine
By: Benjamin Rhodes
Tags: Computer History, Technology, History, Communication, World

In the twenty-first century, fax seems to have become a cliche or a pithy synonym for the outdated, mundane, and antiquated.

However, there was once a time, a time that existed for over 150 years, when fax machines were the height of technological innovation and communication.

To begin our brief history of the fax machine, we must travel back to 1836.

As discussed a couple of weeks ago, 1836 was a tremendous time for communication. Near the end of the decade, Samuel Morse and others invented the electrical telegraph. With the telegraph’s invention came an unprecedented level of communication, the fax machine built on the success and technology of the electric telegraph. As impressive as the telegraph was, it wasn’t intuitive, or available, to the average individual. The telegraph also limited communication to text, prohibiting the distribution of photographs.

Less than ten years after the electrical telegraph was invented, and even before it reached mainstream use, Alexander Bain was on to the next big thing, the fax machine.

The concept behind the fax machine was simple: a machine took an image, transmitted it over electrical wire, then reformed the image on the other side. Even the name “fax” derives from its purpose, fax being short for “facsimile” which means to make similar in Latin (Cengage, “Fax Machine.”).

Bain’s machine employed two identical devices, one receiving and one sending. Each machine had a pendulum which swung across a metal typeface. When the pendulum swung over a raised letter a circuit was completed and an electrical signal was sent down the wire to the second device. A synchronized pendulum on the receiving end would swing over a special paper that would change color when an electrical current was applied (Garfinkel and Grunspan 48). Bain’s initial fax machine, patented under “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs” (Bellis, “Alexander Bain…”), produced crude images and was plagued with problems. A common challenge involved timing the two pendulums.

Once Alexander Bain’s idea had been released to the world, competition took over to improve and market the device.

Giovanni Caselli was the first to offer a major improvement and, incidentally, create the world’s first commercial fax system. Caselli’s system was similar, but much simpler. He used a rotating drum and both transmitting and receiving ends utilized a special paper in which the ink conducted electricity. Caselli called his system the pantelegraph, building a network between Paris and Lyon, France in 1865. Banks used the pantelegraph extensively (Garfinkel and Grunspan 48).

The final major version of the fax machine came in 1881 when Shelford Bidwell used selenium cells to record an image of the document. Due to technical challenges, the first test came in 1904 when Dr. Arthur Korn transmitted an image, a photograph, between Berlin and Nuremberg, Germany (“Stars: Fax Machine.”). This was the first transmission of an image over wire! By 1907, newspapers throughout Europe were using the system to send and receive images in a process that now took only twelve minutes (“Stars: Fax Machine.”).

Because selenium cells proved difficult to work with, many looked for an alternative (“Stars: Fax Machine.”).

The solution was photoelectric cells.

With my limited knowledge of physics, it’s best to summarize photoelectric cells as the method used to capture images for modern scanning, faxing, copying etc. The system essentially scans a document in lines, most documents contain 1,728 pixels per line (Cengage, “The Invention of…”). For each pixel, the photoelectric cell determines whether the pixel is light (white) or dark (black). For each white pixel, the photoelectric cell notes a binary “0” for each black pixel, the cell notes a “1” (Cengage, “The Invention of…”). Through this process, the document could be reduced to binary representation. Further processing would reduce consecutive 0s and 1s to special, shorter, binary codes. Once the binary codes were processed, a modem translated them to analog signals sent along electrical, or more recently, telephone lines. On the receiving end, another fax machine would print dark pixels where directed by the binary.

Over time, the fax machine began to see a variety of uses. As already mentioned, it was primarily used in the news. For the first time, American readers could not only read a story about Europe, they could see Europe. However, with any technology, others began to see its potential. In World War I, the German military began to experiment with fax-based transmission of maps and important communication (“Stars: Fax Machine.”). Not only could text be transmitted without code (such as in Morse Code), but images could be sent and a hard copy could be generated hundreds of miles away. This proved an important development for many offices around the world, by the 1970s, the fax machine began to explode.

In the year 1970, 25,000 fax machines were in use, by 1980 there were 250,000 fax machines. The numbers grew even faster, from 1985 to 1990 fax machine use grew from 500,000 devices to over 5 million (“Stars: Fax Machine.”)!

The office became the home of the fax machine. Communication was suddenly much faster and even more open. Given that the English language is the common language of commerce, telephones were often difficult for many non-native speakers. However, since many could read and write English better than they could speak it, the fax machine became the default method of communication (“Stars: Fax Machine.”).

The fax machine also replaced couriers and message boys. Hard copies of documents could now be sent within minutes from remote locations to remote locations. As the price of fax machines dropped and features grew, many homes even added fax machines. The world had suddenly shrunk yet again.

Unfortunately however, the fax machine is no longer the dominant communication method, even among more outdated offices. How did this happen? How did a device that reached its peak just over twenty years ago fall from its perch so quickly? Well, the answer is simple, but involves a few developments, the most important being personal computer use and email (“Stars: Fax Machine.”).

In the 1970s and 1980s personal computer use was often restricted to executive use or perhaps secretary use. Although seen as powerful machines, computers were not yet prominent staples of the workplace. By the late 1980s, computers began to be seen on nearly every desk in America, and by the 1990s, computers were a given. Since everyone had computers, why was the office limited to communication via one singular device? Closely tied to computing and the development of the Internet was email. More informal communication could be commenced more conveniently from the privacy of one’s own desk.

On June 15, 1993, Adobe released the Portable Document Format (PDF) and even announced it would be free to use.

Suddenly, email, along with the ease of the PDF, became a faster way to send formal documents and share files. Once the shift to the Internet was complete, Internet faxing began to grow, however, pricing and competition didn’t set this new development up for success (Adobe, “Who Created…”).

Although fax machines still exist in nearly any office, they have disappeared from homes and even most business use. The rise of personal computing, the Internet, specifically email, and the advent of the PDF file format all colluded to kill the fax machine.

As the fax machine quickly disappeared from mainstream use, it became a statement for much of the antiquated workplace and those not fully accepting of more modern technologies.

Still, despite this rather entertaining connotation, fax machines have been some of the most influential communication devices ever invented. Fax machines lead to digital versions such as scanning, copying, email, and PDFs.

Fax machines, along with their long and brilliant legacy, are the eighteenth major milestone in the history of computing.