The Fax Machine: Patented in 1843 and Still Refusing to Die

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

So imagine you are walking into this totally cutting edge hospital.

You know, the kind where the surgeon is an actual robot, and the diagnostics are all run by artificial intelligence. Patient records are just beamed instantly across these secure networks. It basically feels like you're standing on the bridge of a starship.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

Sounds incredibly futuristic.

SPEAKER_1 (0:19)

It is, but then you peek behind the nurses station, and what do you find?

SPEAKER_2 (0:24)

Let me guess.

SPEAKER_1 (0:24)

Yeah, a screeching beige plastic machine that relies on technology literally patented before the American Civil War. The fax machine.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

It really is the ultimate technological paradox. We have laser-guided medicine right next to this paper-jamming relic that just completely refuses to die.

SPEAKER_1 (0:42)

Exactly. And welcome to our deep dive into the epic and honestly bafflingly stubborn history of the fax machine.

Think about the last time you bought a house or had to deal with a complex medical claim.

SPEAKER_2 (0:54)

Or literally anything involving a government agency.

SPEAKER_1 (0:57)

Right. You probably hit a wall where some administrator demanded you send a fax.

And it feels like a joke, but today you and I are going to track this technology from its 19th century mechanical origins all the way to its really unlikely survival in the 21st century.

SPEAKER_2 (1:12)

Because understanding why the fax machine is still here is actually, well, it's a master class in how human infrastructure really evolves.

SPEAKER_1 (1:20)

Yeah. And we often just assume that the best or like the fastest technology naturally wins out.

SPEAKER_2 (1:26)

But the history of the fax machine absolutely proves that human habits, legal structures and just bureaucratic fear actually dictate the tools we use.

SPEAKER_1 (1:35)

Totally.

So to understand the modern day survival of the fax, we really have to look at the foundation of the technology itself. And if you had asked me yesterday, I would have sworn the fax machine was born in like the 1980s.

SPEAKER_2 (1:46)

Most people do.

SPEAKER_1 (1:47)

Right. I just picture shoulder pads, those huge brick cell phones and thermal paper. But this thing predates the telephone.

SPEAKER_2 (1:54)

By decades, actually. If we look at the historical records, there was this Scottish senator named Alexander Bain, and he received a British patent in 1843 for something he called the electric printing telegraph.

SPEAKER_1 (2:06)

Wait, 1843?

SPEAKER_2 (2:08)

Yeah. By 1846, he was successfully reproducing graphic signs in laboratory experiments, and he used this really clever chemical mechanical process.

SPEAKER_1 (2:17)

So we are talking about people sending images before voice communication over wires was even like a concept.

SPEAKER_2 (2:24)

And it wasn't just a parlor trick either. By 1865, an Italian physicist, Giovanni Caselli, he introduced the pantelograph. Pantelograph, okay. Yeah. And this became the very first commercial telephax service. They set it up between Paris and Lyon and France.

And just to frame that historically for you, 1865 is 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell even invented the telephone.

SPEAKER_1 (2:47)

That is wild. I am really trying to wrap my head around the mechanics of this though, because we don't have phone networks yet. We just have basic telegraph wires.

SPEAKER_2 (2:58)

Right. Just single copper wires.

SPEAKER_1 (3:00)

So how is an image traveling hundreds of miles down a single copper wire? I am picturing like a mechanical Etch-a-Sketch connected by a really, really long string.

SPEAKER_2 (3:09)

You know, that mechanical Etch-a-Sketch analogy is actually a really great way to visualize it.

SPEAKER_1 (3:13)

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_2 (3:14)

Yeah. These early machines relied on direct telegraph wires, and the engineering was purely mechanical. It was surprisingly beautiful, honestly.

Imagine a metal pendulum swinging back and forth over a copper plate.

SPEAKER_1 (3:26)

Okay, a pendulum.

SPEAKER_2 (3:27)

The sender writes or draws on that plate with a special insulating ink, and as the pendulum swings, a little stylus drags across the plate.

SPEAKER_1 (3:35)

Oh, I see where this is going.

SPEAKER_2 (3:37)

Right. So whenever it hits the bare copper, it completes an electrical circuit, which sends a pulse down the telegraph wire.

But when the stylus hits the ink, the circuit breaks. Exactly. The circuit breaks.

SPEAKER_1 (3:48)

So it's essentially translating the physical image into this binary series of electrical pulses, lined by agonizing line. Yep.

SPEAKER_2 (3:57)

And then the magic happens on the receiving end in another city. They have another perfectly synchronized pendulum swinging over chemically treated paper.

SPEAKER_1 (4:05)

Wow.

SPEAKER_2 (4:06)

And when that electrical pulse arrives from the wire, it triggers a chemical reaction that leaves a dark mark on the paper. So as long as those two pendulums swing at the exact same speed, the image slowly builds up, stroke by stroke.