By 2016, it is evident the FAX machine has peaked. Sure, you still see a few. There are even services that will let you send and receive FAXes via Internet–which could mean no FAX machine was involved at all. But looking back, you have to wonder where it all started. Most people had never seen a FAX machine until the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was 1980 before there was a standard. Some, like hams and weather service employees, were using them even earlier. But would it surprise you to know that the first experimental FAX machine appeared in 1843?
Wait a minute. Bell didn’t even build a telephone until 1875 (the patent issued in 1876). Turns out the first FAX machines didn’t work with a phone. They worked over a telegraph wire.
Bain’s Pendulums
Granted, this isn’t precisely the FAX machine we know. The metal pins and probes required the image to be cut out. However, it has all the components you need: a sensor, and encoder, a decoder, and an output device. Results, however, were poor because operators had to synchronize the clocks on both ends accurately and that was nearly impossible to do.
Inventors hotly contested patents back then. Earlier, Charles Wheatstone discouraged Bain from continuing to work on the electric clock, but then built one himself and tried to take credit for it. Luckily, Bain had filed for a patent anyway and wound up winning the princely sum of £10,000 (quite a bankroll in the 1800’s) from Wheatstone in a court judgment. However, the patent system wasn’t as kind to Bain in 1850. Another inventor, Frederick Bakewell, preempted Bain’s.
Bakewell’s Cylinders
A commercially viable system had to wait until 1861. That was the year an Italian priest developed the Pantelegraph. It was a far cry from a modern FAX machine, but it was the first machine that was more than a demonstration device.
Pantelegraph
The Pantelegraph, developed by Giovanni Caselli, could transmit an image of about 6 inches by 4 inches. It also used a pendulum with a magnet to synchronize the transmitter and receiver. For accuracy, this required an 18-pound weight mounted on a frame over six feet high! This wasn’t a portable FAX machine.
It wasn’t that fast either. A 4-inch long paper strip about 1 inch wide took over a minute and half to send. That band might contain about 25 handwritten words. In 1860 Napoleon III saw the device and arranged for Caselli to have access to long distance telegraph lines. The signature of composer Gioacchino Rossini appeared 87 miles away.
By 1862, a commercial system between Lyons and Paris was in place with public access in 1863. By 1865, you could also transmit images back to Lyons and to Marseille by 1867. That service operated until 1870. Tsar Nicolas I also set up a system between his palaces in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Bidwell, Korn and the Telediagraph
By 1881, Shelford Bidwell constructed a “scanning phototelegraph.” This was the first machine to optically scan the material to send, avoiding drawing on foil or some other means of converting the image to an electrically readable format. This isn’t surprising from Bidwell since he was known for experimenting with selenium photocells.
Bidwell sidestepped the synchronization problem by putting the scanning cylinder and the receiving cylinder on the same motor shaft. In that way, the instrument was more of a photocopier than a FAX. However, his article about the device in an 1881 issue of Nature exposed the idea of optical scanning. Bidwell would go on to write another Nature article in 1908 that predicted some of the issues involved in transmitting and receiving what we’d call television.
There were other early machines that all worked without optical scanning. Inventor Ernest A. Hummel’s Telediagraph dates from 1898. In this system, an 8-inch by 6-inch piece of foil was painted with an insulating ink made from thin shellac. The foil was on a drum and at the end of each revolution, a synchronization signal causes each drum to move 1/56th of an inch to the left. Several newspapers, including the New York Herald, the Chicago Times Herald, the St. Louis Republic, and the Philadelphia Inquirer used these machines. An article in a 1900 Pearson’s Magazine described this machine and included some pictures of it in operation.
The Belinograph and Elisha Gray
The machine was greatly improved by Vladimir Zworykin (who worked for Western Electric) in 1929. Zworykin’s improved machine could send a full page in only one minute. Machines like this carried news photos around the country to newspapers on behalf of agencies like Associated Press and International News Photos. In fact, there was even a false start to sending news to homes via FAX.
It is amazing that Elisha Gray isn’t more of a household name. He may have developed the telephone before Bell, although that’s a subject of hot debate. He co-founded Western Electric and was one of the founders of Graybar. His invention of the “Musical Telegraph” may make him one of the many fathers of the modern music synthesizer.
Gray had over 70 patents, but the one of interest related to FAX was for the Telautograph. The Gray National Telautograph Company formed in 1888 and was eventually bought by Xerox in the 1990s. As the name might suggest, the Telautograph was made to capture signatures or handwriting. It used potentiometers (say, that sounds familiar) and caused a pen on the receiver to duplicate the motion of the pen in the sender’s hand.
This isn’t much of a traditional FAX machine, although it was useful where a signature was necessary, like banks and hospitals. Some train stations used these machines up until the 1970s, and one can be seen in the 1956 movie Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (which is not a court room drama, if you were wondering).
Wireless FAX and the FAX of Tomorrow
Even though most modern FAX machines used telephone wires, there have been no shortage of radio-based FAX machines, too, starting about 1923. We’ve talked before about Rudolph Hell’s invention, which is sort of a cross between a teletype and a FAX. Then there was the Telefax service which was a cross between telegrams and pizza delivery.
Over time, FAX machines got more complicated. Herbert Ives developed a color FAX machine. By 1964, Xerox introduced Long Distance Xerography–the first thing most of us would recognize as a modern FAX machine. By 1966, the Xerox MagnaFax could connect to a standard phone line and send a letter-size sheet in about six minutes. It would be the 1980’s, though, before the ITU G3 standard made it realistic to send a FAX from one brand of machine to another.
But today, the FAX machine is almost a relic. Almost. There are still a few hold outs, of course. You can also have a computer send or receive a FAX, either with a modem or via the Internet. In many cases, the computer to computer transfer via FAX is unnecessary, but at least it is universal.
What’s next? Maybe 3D scanners and 3D printers will evolve to the point that they become the new FAX machine, transmitting solid objects around the world just like the FAX sent documents. It isn’t quite the Star Trek transporter, but it might still have its uses.
Main image photo: The Radio Historian
Bildtelegraph photo: Jodo CC BY-SA 3.0
Belinograph photo: Sandstein CC BY-SA 3.0,
Filed under: Retrotechtacular
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