Until the 1950s, individuals were the key developers and rivals. 2 (Paris: Librarie Furne, Jouvet et Cie, 1870) Louis Figuier, Les Merveilles de la Science Vol. (Figure 1)įigure 1: The French telegraph administration operated the world’s first fax service in 1865 with Abbé Caselli’s pantelegraph. after World War II to Western Union and Xerox in the 1950s-60s, there was no area of the fax market, no niche too small, for players to struggle against each other for commercial acceptance. From Alexander Bain and Frederick Bakewell in the 1840s Giovanni Caselli and Bernhard Meyer in the 1860s Arthur Korn and Eduoard Belin in the 1910s Wirephoto and Soundphoto in the 1930s Times Facsimile Inc. These shifts reflected larger movements of technology, manufacturing, and capital, and thus changes in the relative capabilities and status of countries.Īn integral part of fax’s evolution was competition-within the technology, and without. Fax history is therefore a global tale, involving the competition and diffusion of ideas, research, and manufacturing from Europe to North America to Japan and back. Facsimile’s history relies on technical and business advances in the telecommunications, electronics, and computer industries without them, there would be no fax industry. The history of the fax machine reflects the changing nature of “high technology,” a phrase signifying a technology on the cutting edge of novelty and almost–or actually–practical. Beyond the black, or gray, or white box of the machine, there were changes in facsimile’s enabling and supporting technologies, the social environment, its competition, and the expectations and assumptions of its promoters and users. Third, and ironically enough, they became easier to use while more sophisticated in capability. Second, as machines became more sophisticated, they became "black boxes," their technical aspects increasingly hidden from view. First, the complexity of fax equipment vastly increased over time. Three broad, intertwined, technical trends help define the history of facsimile. The three main components remain the scanner-transmitter, the transmitting medium, and the receiver-recorder. The basic concept of a facsimile, or fax, machine–a machine that electrically transmits an image–has not changed since 1843. By 2000, however, e-mail and the Internet had rendered the fax machine obsolescent, though not obsolete. Fax became an essential communications tool in the 1980s, first in Japan, followed by the United States and the rest of the world. The mid-1960s saw the first sustained efforts to produce fax machines for general business use. The first commercial service operated in the 1860s but the first profitable service appeared only after World War I. The concept of electrically transmitting an exact copy (from the Latin fac-simile, "make similar") has been credited to the Scottish inventor, Alexander Bain (1810-76) who received a patent in Great Britain and Ireland on, then by the US Patent Office as US 5957 on 5 December 1848 that described his process of electronically copying and transmitting images between distant locales. 12.1 References of Historical Significance.10 The Decline of Fax and Rise of Email.5 Birth of a Practical Technology, 1865-1910s.