Buzz
We often joke about the fax machine being an artifact of the past—something from the days before email attachments and cloud storage—but the truth is, it’s actually quite old.
Fathers of Invention
The first facsimile (from the Latin fac simile, meaning 'make alike') device was created in 1843 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. A clockmaker by profession, he utilized clock components to synchronize the movements of a transmitter and receiver for a line-by-line 'scanning' process of messages and images. Although Bain’s experiments showed promise, Englishman Frederick Bakewell surpassed him in the race to patent the 'image telegraph,' and Bain’s device ultimately failed to gain traction.
Bakewell’s device successfully transmitted the first 'telefax' in 1847. It was capable of sending handwritten text and simple sketches, but its limited usefulness—due to slow transmission speeds and inconsistent synchronization—meant it was mostly relegated to demonstrations at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.
The first truly functional fax machine was the pantelegraph, invented in the 1850s by Giovanni Caselli, an Italian priest, physicist, and inventor (who also had a reputation for stirring up trouble—while living in Modena as a tutor, he participated in protests calling for Modena to join Piedmont, which led to his expulsion by the duke).
How It Worked
To operate Caselli’s machine, the sender would write a message or draw an image on a tin sheet using non-conductive ink. This sheet was placed onto a plate, where a stylus, part of an electrical circuit, moved across the sheet in parallel lines. On the receiving end, another stylus, connected via telegraph lines, moved in sync across specially treated paper.
As the transmitter scanned, it would complete the circuit when the stylus passed over the blank areas of the tin sheet, and break the current when it hit the inked sections. The pattern of these electrical signals was sent over the wire to the synchronized receiver, and the chemical paper changed color where the current passed through. The result was an exact replica of the original.
Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Caselli solved the synchronization issues that plagued Bain and Bakewell by using two regulating clocks and a pendulum that acted as a time base for the moving parts of the styluses. While 20th-century fax machines were bulky, Caselli’s pantelegraph prototype was massive. The pendulum alone weighed 18 pounds and was suspended in a 6-foot-tall cast iron frame.
The Rise of the Machine
During a demonstration in Paris, the pantelegraph impressed not only the French scientific community but also Emperor Napoleon III, who granted Caselli access to state-owned telegraph lines for his long-distance transmission experiments. Using the Paris-Amiens line, Caselli successfully sent an image of composer Gioachino Rossini’s signature across a distance of 87 miles. Not long after, the French government installed a permanent pantelegraph system on the Paris-Lyon telegraph line for public use, eventually extending it to Marseille. In the UK, the system was added to the London-Liverpool line, and in Russia, Emperor Nicholas I used it for communication between his palaces in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The pantelegraph's period of prominence was brief. The company formed to operate the system in Paris failed to effectively market its services, assuming that investors and customers would flock to the new technology on their own. Additionally, the pantelegraph suffered from the same issues as Bakewell’s machine over long distances. Its transmission rate—about 12 words per minute—limited it mostly to tasks like verifying signatures for business deals. Despite Caselli’s improved synchronization method, it struggled with longer distances, and transmissions often ended up illegible.
As the pantelegraph lost traction in Europe, it piqued interest in other parts of the world. The Chinese had little use for the traditional telegraph and Morse code because their written language consists of logograms rather than letters, but the pantelegraph offered a way to transmit their language and opened the door to long-distance telecommunication. Chinese officials made an attempt to establish a pantelegraph system in Peking, but their negotiations with Caselli ultimately failed. A century later, a similar challenge would lead to the rapid and widespread adoption of the modern fax machine in Japan, along with the global spread of Japanese-made machines.
Primary image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
