A short history of the machine that refuses to die
If you've only ever seen a fax machine in the background of an old movie, here's the surprising part: it's older than the telephone. Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, patented the first fax-like device in Great Britain in 1843 — 33 years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the phone. Bain's contraption used synchronized pendulums and an electrically conductive stylus to scan a message and reproduce it at a distance. It never caught on commercially, but the idea was out in the world.
That idea found its first real home in France. An Italian priest and physicist named Giovanni Caselli spent the late 1850s perfecting a device he called the pantelegraph, and in 1865 the French telegraph administration put it into full commercial service — connecting Paris and Lyon, and later Marseille. In its first year of operation, the pantelegraph transmitted nearly 5,000 faxes at a rate of up to 110 per hour. One of the earliest test transmissions, sent between Paris and Amiens in 1860, carried the signature of composer Gioacchino Rossini — arguably the world's first celebrity fax.
Progress slowed for a while after that. In 1904, German inventor Arthur Korn built a photoelectric scanning system and sent a photograph from Berlin to Nuremberg; by 1907, European newspapers were routinely publishing photos wired in this way. AT&T launched a commercial wirephoto service in 1925. But fax machines were still rare, specialized, expensive things — by 1933, there were only around 100 of them in the entire world.
The device you'd actually recognize didn't show up until Xerox entered the picture. Its Magnafax Telecopier, released in 1966, was the first fax machine simple enough to plug into an ordinary phone line and use in a regular office — no telegraph operator required. Even so, adoption stayed slow until international standards caught up: the ITU approved the Group 3 standard in 1980, which let fax machines from different manufacturers actually talk to each other. That one change set off an explosion. In the U.S. alone, the number of fax machines in use jumped from about 500,000 in 1985 to 5 million by 1990. Sales peaked in the U.S. in 1997, and a few years later — in 2000 — in Japan, where the fax machine became so embedded in business culture that it never really left.
Then email happened, and everyone assumed fax would quietly disappear. It didn't. It just moved. Hospitals, law firms, government agencies, title companies, and tax authorities kept faxing — many still do today — because a fax has properties email doesn't: it's a direct, point-to-point transmission that doesn't sit in an inbox waiting to be phished, and in a lot of regulated industries, that still counts for a lot.
Which is really the whole story of fax: not a relic that survived by accident, but a piece of 19th-century engineering that turned out to solve a very modern problem. It just took until now for someone to get rid of the machine part.