It would take another century before fax technology truly found its stride, though. In , Xerox invented the Long Distance Xerograph LDX , a fax machine that could transmit regular-size documents one page at a time to any fax machine in the world.
Unfortunately, it took around six minutes to do so. There are a number of reasons why analog fax machines helped to take fax to the next level. For starters, all you needed to do was plug your fax machine into a regular phone line, and wham! You were ready to send your next fax. But as corporations began to rely more heavily on analog fax machines, the cost to maintain them began to add up.
There were paper costs, ink costs, maintenance and repair costs, and more. Plus, there was the inconvenience of having administrators run documents back and forth to the fax machine — impatiently waiting for a busy signal to give way to a much-needed ringtone.
And when faxes did transmit, administrators would have to distribute them one-by-one to their intended recipient. Fax technology was transforming, but it was still a pain. Adding fax machines to copiers or multifunction devices MFDs was supposed to make faxing more convenient. And in a lot of ways it did. You could scan, print, fax, and copy documents from one standalone machine — hooray!
But the cost factor was still a major problem for owners. In many instances, the cost to run a MFD was more than the cost to run a traditional fax machine. This was around the time that corporations began switching to fax servers to improve the function of their MFDs and standalone fax machines. On the whole, fax servers were great.
Fax machine owners could reduce paper costs and send faxes faster. But as with any next-generation technology, the cost to set up a fax server was expensive.
So expensive, in fact, that one server could run thousands of dollars to buy, set up, and run. Users could send faxes directly from their desktop — without having to deal with an actual printer or fax machine.
Further, fax servers answered the all-important question of how to handle private information, which HIPAA law prevents from lingering out in the open on, say, an old-fashioned fax machine, for example. As fax servers became the new norm for corporations, however, small business owners and individuals were still looking for ways to make faxing easier for them.
As the world migrated to the web for most of its data needs, including email, cloud storage, and document editing, a new evolution in fax began in the mids. The fax machine is a lot older than you might think. Its first commercial use was providing service in France between Paris and Lyon in Indeed, the trusty fax machine lived a long and eventful life. The word fax is short for facsimile. While the first commercial use of the fax machine occurred in , the inception of a fax service took place almost 20 years earlier.
In , Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices that were able to reproduce graphic signs in lab experiments. From there, Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli invented the Pantelegraph a hybrid of pantograph and telegraph where its first commercial use happened in For over years, the use of the fax machine has been cumbersome, costly, and difficult to operate. By the late s, both national and international companies had entered the fax market, especially Japan.
The first known fax technology is credited to Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor and engineer who specialized in clocks. He was the first inventor to patent an electric clock and also installed the railway telegraph lines between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
In the early s, he built an experimental fax machine and used a clock to synchronize the movements of two pendulums that scan an image line by line. The image was initially placed on a cylinder, scanned by the sending machine and reproduced by the receiving machine using a chemical solution.
Developed in the s by Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli, the pantelegraph was one of the earliest precursors to the modern fax machine. It was used throughout the s to send handwriting and images over telegraph lines, and was most commonly used to verify signatures during banking transactions. Documents sent using the device could measure up to 15 cm by 10 cm. The pantelegraph worked over long distances, but was slow.
A single sheet of paper measuring mm by 27 mm 4 inches by 1 inch that contained about 25 words would take almost two full minutes to transmit. Two pendulums, weighing 18 lbs each and mounted on 6. The messages were written using insulating ink on fixed metal plates. They were then scanned and the message transmitted via telegraph lines to the receiving apparatus, which would reproduce the images using paper containing potassium ferricyanide, a substance that darkens when electric current from the writing stylus passes through it.
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