A Brief History of the Fax Machine
Believe it or not, the fax machine was patented
in 1843, more than thirty years before a patent was granted for
the telephone. The fax machine was invented by Alexander Bain, a
Scotsman who also invented the first electric clock. In 1865, the
first commercial fax service began between Lyon and Paris; in 1906,
newspapers started using fax machines to transmit photographs from
one location to another.
Early fax machines
The first fax machines worked much like modern fax machines, but
slower. Instead of using thousands of separate sensors to scan the
original document for black and white areas, the original fax machines
used a single sensor, which could focus on an area as small as one
one-hundredth of an inch square. That sensor was attached to a rotating
drum, to which the original document was affixed. As the drum rotated,
the sensor could examine each section of the page in turn.
Once the differences between the black and white
areas of the page were defined and translated into two different
telephone tones, those tones would be sent through the phone line
to a receiving fax machine. This machine would translate the tones
back into a pattern of black and white. The visual pattern would
then be inscribed by a pen, attached to a rotating drum to which
a blank sheet of paper was affixed.
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