Fax Machine History

Although fax machines that transfer messages over phone lines are a modern technology, its prototypes go back over 150 years, beginning with Scottish inventor Alexander Bain’s chemical facsimile devices that were capable of making rough copies of images and documents. However, the copies weren’t clean enough to be useful, and Bain’s machines never rose above novelty status.

The first practical early fax machine was invented by Italian Giovanni Caselli, who created the first commercial fax service in 1865, successfully sending messages between Paris and Lyons. The renderings still weren’t great, but they were at least legible.

Over the next half century or so, faxing developed at a steady pace until, by the early 1900s, the technology was capable of sending images across long distances. By 1908, for example, law enforcement authorities were capable of sending wanted-person photographs between Paris and London. Soon thereafter, a technology known as radiofax made it possible to do the same thing via radio waves—that is, without using a telephone line at all.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that modern-style optical scanning technologies become available. In the earliest fax machines to use optical scanning, documents were drawn onto a drum and rolled beneath the photocell. These early machines essentially would cast a bright light on the document being scanned and capture the light and dark areas that were reflected.

Since then, fax machines have only gotten more and more advanced, and they’re now capable of capturing and sending near-perfect renderings of documents, and they can do so almost instantaneously. With the internet, many of the functions formerly performed by fax machines have now moved online, and email is generally even faster than faxing. However, many people feel that faxing is still the best technology for quickly and securely sending sensitive documents or anything that needs to be signed.

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