Facsimiles (faxes)

An example of a modern fax machine.
Source: Wikipedia

Faxes have been around for a lot longer than many people realise. Scottish mechanic Alexander Bain patented the first fax machine in 1843. This was 33 years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone!

Bain was an amateur clock maker and his fax machine combined clock mechanisms with telegraph technology. It involved a flat surface to be scanned and a stylus mounted on a pendulum that would copy images on the flat surface as it swung back and forth.

Although Bain figured out how a facsimile transmission would work, he did not envisage its use today. His original intention was to create a device that could be used to trace letters and then repeat their outlines on the receiving end. He failed to see its potential to transmit entire images instead of text.

Despite Bain's innovative idea, it was another ten years before the first facsimile was sent.

Italian Abbot Giovanni Caselli developed the 'pantelegraph', which was used after 1856 to send pictures and writings between French cities. This invention had a short life and was phased out in the 1870s due of the popularity of the electrical telegraph.

It wasn't until the early twentieth century that the fax machine began to increase in use, and it wasn't until the 1970s that the technology became popular.

In 1902, Dr Arthur Korn developed a fax machine with an optical scanner that allowed paper images to be sent. This was followed by another innovation in 1914 when Edouard Belin introduced the concept of remote fax photo/news reporting.

By 1924 the 'telephotography machine' as it was known, was used to send political convention photos over long distances for newspaper publication.

These fax machines were still crude. Pictures had to be printed onto tin foil with non-conducting ink before an electrode scanned the surface to sense light and dark patches. The transmitting and receiving machines had drums that spun at the same speed; each turn of the drum clicked half a millimetre to the left so that eventually the whole picture was scanned.

With these machines it took about half an hour to send a 20cm by 15cm photograph.

In the late 1970s the Japanese combined computer printer and facsimile technology to greatly improve the crispness of faxed images. By using modern production techniques they were able to reduce the cost of fax machines and make them a requirement in every office.

Today, despite the ability to send images and documents via email, faxes remain one of the most important telecommunications tools within the modern office.