If the word fax brings to mind 90s offices, screeching handshake sounds and curling thermal paper, you're not alone. Most of us knew the fax as a device connected to a phone line, so we assume it came after the telephone. The truth is the opposite: the patent for the idea was granted 33 years before the telephone patent.
The hero of the story is not an engineer but a clockmaker.
A Scottish clockmaker's "electric printing telegraph"
Alexander Bain was born in 1810 in Caithness, Scotland, and trained as a clockmaker. On May 27, 1843 he received British patent number 9745. The patent's name sounds odd today: "Electric Printing Telegraph".
Bain's claim was bold. He wrote that a copy of any surface made of conducting and insulating materials could be transmitted to a distance with this method. In other words, he was talking about sending an image over a wire. According to Wikipedia, in 1846 he managed to reproduce graphic marks in laboratory experiments. He also protected his idea on the other side of the Atlantic: on December 5, 1848 he received US patent number 5,957, titled "improvement in copying surfaces by electricity".
Pendulums, metal pins and chemical paper
Bain's system was as mechanical as you'd expect from a clockmaker's mind. A pendulum at each end was synchronized by a clockwork mechanism. The message to be sent was formed with metal pins set on an insulating cylinder. An electric stylus scanned these pins line by line, and as it made contact, on/off current pulses went down the line.
On the receiving end was electrosensitive paper soaked in a chemical solution. Where current arrived, the paper changed color, so the message was "printed" again line by line. The basic logic of today's faxes (breaking an image into lines, scanning it, and redrawing it in the same order at the other end) was already there at that time.
The problem was synchronization. Wikipedia notes that the laboratory setups of Bain and of Frederick Bakewell, who took out his own patent in 1848, produced poor-quality images, because the transmitter and receiver were never in perfect sync. Bakewell nevertheless demonstrated his machine at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The first commercial fax line: between Paris and Lyon
The person who took the idea out of the laboratory and turned it into a real service was the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli. With the "pantelegraph" he developed in 1861, the first commercial fax service began in 1865 between Paris and Lyon. In Wikipedia's words, this was about 11 years before the invention of the telephone.
So in the mid-1860s in France it was possible to send a handwritten note or a signature to another city over a telegraph line. At that time nobody had yet heard another person's voice over a wire.
So when did the telephone arrive?
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent (US patent No. 174,465) was granted on March 7, 1876. The math is simple: 1876 minus 1843, a full 33 years. And from Caselli's commercial line it is 11 years.
The fax's "connection" to the telephone happened much later. Western Union announced the desktop Deskfax in 1948, and Xerox released the LDX in 1964, regarded as the first commercial fax in the modern sense. The 1966 Magnafax Telecopier could be connected to a standard telephone line and send a letter-sized page in about six minutes.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| 1843: a patent with pendulums and chemical paper | E-fax from a computer |
| Five wires between sender and receiver | A single phone line or the internet |
| 1966: about 6 minutes per page | About 40 seconds per page by the 1980 standard |
The fax's long life
The fax's real boom came in the 1980s. In 1980 the ITU (then called CCITT) published the T.4 recommendation that opened the way to digital fax, and the time per page dropped to about 40 seconds. There were other milestones along the way: in 1880 Shelford Bidwell built a "scanning phototelegraph" that could scan any two-dimensional document, and Elisha Gray's 1888 telautograph made it possible to send signatures over a distance. Those beige boxes that were indispensable to offices were in fact grandchildren of an idea that started at a clockmaker's bench in the mid-19th century.
This story reminds us that technology doesn't always move along a straight line: sometimes an invention we think of as "old" turns out to be much older than another we think of as "fundamental".
Which technology we use today, do you think, actually rests on an idea far older than we imagine?