The Fax Machine: Patented in 1843 and Still Refusing to Die

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The fax machine is older than the telephone. Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a British patent in 1843 for his electric printing telegraph, and by 1865 Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph was running a commercial service between Paris and Lyon, 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell's invention. This episode traces how synchronized pendulums, copper plates, and insulating ink turned images into electrical pulses, and why bankers and lawyers prized the result: a signature they could see, not a name tapped out in Morse code.

The story moves through radio facsimile in the 1920s, a failed home radio newspaper in the 1930s, satellite and police uses, and the walled gardens of the 1970s, when rival machines could not talk to each other. A 1980 standard and a clever compression scheme made the fax the lifeblood of business in the 1980s and 1990s. The harder question is why it survives now. The answers run through Japanese hanko stamps, American privacy law, legal precedent on signatures, and a sense of security that no longer matches how fax calls actually travel.

• In 1924, RCA designer Richard H. Ranger sent a photograph of President Calvin Coolidge from New York to London by radio, and Herbert E. Ives of AT&T transmitted a color fax of Rudolph Valentino using three separations.
• Xerox's 1966 Magnafax Telecopier weighed 46 pounds and connected to a telephone through an acoustic coupler.
• The screech of a fax call is a negotiation that opens with a 1,100 hertz calling tone, then settles speed, resolution, and compression.
• Modified Huffman coding sent instructions describing runs of white and black pixels, cutting transmission to about 40 seconds a page.
• During the pandemic, Berlin districts reported zero new COVID cases for days because health department fax machines were overwhelmed and ran out of paper.