The idea in one paragraph
A fax machine scans a page, turns the light and dark areas into an electrical signal, sends the signal over a line, and prints a copy at the other end. “Fax” is short for facsimile, meaning an exact copy. The principle was worked out in the 1840s, when Alexander Bain patented a pendulum-scanning system, and it was refined through the nineteenth century by inventors such as Frederick Bakewell and Giovanni Caselli. The more familiar story begins when the technology became practical for offices.
Newspapers and wire services
Between the world wars, facsimile found its first steady commercial use in transmitting photographs and weather charts. Newspapers and news agencies set up networks that could send a picture from one city to another in minutes. Radio versions allowed pictures to cross oceans. These early machines were large, expensive and usually run by specialists.
Beyond news, facsimile had specialized uses. Weather services broadcast charts to ships and stations, and some of these radio facsimile services lasted a long time. Printing a chart at sea was far more useful than reading out a long list of numbers.
Machines for offices
In the 1960s companies began selling machines meant for ordinary offices, using the existing telephone network. Xerox introduced a desktop model in 1964, built on the company’s experience with xerography and coupled to a telephone line. Machines of this type were slow, often taking several minutes for a page, and they typically needed matching equipment at both ends.
The earliest standards, now often called Group 1 and Group 2, reduced the time per page, roughly six minutes for the first and three for the second. The need for standards was obvious: a fax was only useful if you could send it to someone else, and not everyone had the same brand.
The Group 3 era
The change that made fax a mass product was a new international standard for Group 3 machines, agreed around 1980. It used digital compression to reduce the amount of data in a page, so that a page could be sent in about a minute or less over an ordinary telephone line. Because the page was converted to digital form, fax machines used integrated circuits and the modems that were becoming cheaper at that time.
With lower prices and a standard that worked between brands, fax machines spread through the 1980s. By the end of the decade they were a normal piece of office equipment in many countries. They were especially popular in Japan, where written characters were hard to type on typewriter keyboards of the time, and handwritten pages sent by fax were a natural fit.
Fax had real advantages. It could send handwriting, drawings, signatures and stamped documents. Many legal and business processes accepted a faxed signature as sufficiently authentic. It also worked over the telephone network that already existed, and it needed no computer.
Why it declined
The fax was a way of moving paper by wire, and the rise of computer networks reduced the need for paper. When email with attachments, scanned PDF files and later web-based document signing became ordinary, sending a scanned page by email was faster and kept the document in digital form, without needing a printer at the other end. Fax quality was also limited: low resolution, gray tones that were hard to reproduce, and pages that curled out of the tray.
Some machines were replaced by multifunction devices that combined laser printers, copiers and image scanners with a fax feature, and others by internet-based fax services that convert between email and fax. Even so, the fax kept a foothold in places where established procedures call for it, including parts of medicine, law and government in some countries. The reasons given are habit, regulation and a perceived sense of security, rather than technical superiority.
A short timeline
- 1843: Alexander Bain patents a system for copying images over a wire using synchronized pendulums.
- 1850s-1860s: Bakewell and Caselli build working machines; a service operates between Paris and Lyon from 1865.
- Early 1900s: Photographs are sent by wire between cities using light-sensitive scanning.
- 1930s: News agencies run wirephoto networks.
- 1960s: Office machines appear, including a desktop machine from Xerox in 1964.
- Around 1980: The Group 3 standard makes fax cheap and compatible.
- 1990s and after: Email and scanned files gradually reduce its use.
What lasted
The fax shows how a technology can go through several lives: a scientific curiosity, a newsroom tool, an office standard and finally a niche service. The scanning and compression methods it used remained useful in other fields, and in a sense every scanned PDF is a descendant of the facsimile idea. The technology that once seemed to be the future of office communication quietly became a historical footnote, though one that stayed around much longer than many predicted.