Facts About the Fax Machine

A fax machine just blends into daily office life and it’s probably rare that you ever consider how it was invented. A fax machine is simply used to send documents from one machine to another and is usually used for urgent documents which require a signature such as business contracts. Some might think the fax machine is coming to the end of its useful life and will be replaced by email the way DVDs are eclipsing video cassettes. This isn’t the case though as the fax machine is now an integral part of office life and most companies wouldn’t be without one. How did the fax come to be in most offices though? Take a look at the facts below...

The original inventor

The fax machine isn’t a child of the 1980s although this is when it became a popular addition to offices worldwide. The first step towards the fax machines we know today was made way back in 1843 when Scottish inventor Alexander Bain connected two pens on two pendulums and joined them together with a wire. He was able to reproduce writing on a surface which conducted electricity. This invention would look quite odd in today’s offices although it would probably be a lot of fun to play with. The fax machine had to go through quite a lot of modifications after Bain’s initial idea.

The other inventors

The late 1800s and early 1900s saw a surge in the evolution of the fax machine where it wasn’t so much the survival of the fittest but the survival and adaptation of the fittest ideas. Adaptation could be a polite way of saying ‘ripping off’ as the ideas flowed from one inventor to the other and over continents with inventors making the previous version more successful and racing to patent their developments. Key inventors include Giovanni Caselli, an Italian who created the Pantelegraph and sent a fax from Paris to Lyon in 1860 and American Ernest Hummel who invented a close contender called the Telediagraph in 1895. Arthur Korn invented telephotography in 1902 in Germany when he manually broke down still photographs and transmitted them through electrical wires. Five years later he sent the first fax from Munich to Berlin.

The breakthrough

It was in France in 1925 that the prototype for the faxes we know today was invented by Edouard Beeline. Beeline created the Belinograph which used a light beam and a photoelectric cell to convert the absence of light on an image into a series of electric pulses. This idea was championed by newspaper corporations who used the technology to send photographs to other offices.

Fax machines for all

These early faxes were difficult to use and expensive to buy and it took until 1966 for the Xerox company to develop the fax machine so it could be connected to a phone line and be small enough to fit into any office. These developments continued as companies made each new model of fax machine smaller, cheaper and easier to use and the fax machine became what we know and use today.

So there you go – the next time you send a fax, spare a thought for the centuries of ideas which went into creating this handy office gadget.

If you need a fax machine for home or office use A2B Office Equipment offer a selection of inkjet, laser and multifunction fax machines.