The Fax & The Furious - Transmitting Text Over Paper Was The Original DM

The idea of a machine that transmits a piece of paper over a telephone line seems almost comically antiquated. But for decades, the fax machine was a technological titan—a ubiquitous and indispensable tool that revolutionized how we do business and communicate over long distances.

Join us on this episode of "Dirt Nap City" as we unspool the fascinating history of the fax machine. We'll start in the mid-19th century with the almost-forgotten Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, whose "electric printing telegraph" laid the groundwork for what would become a global sensation over a century later. We’ll trace the slow, steady development of the technology, from its early use in transmitting weather maps and wire photos to its eventual mainstream adoption.

The true golden age of the fax machine, however, began in the 1980s. We'll explore how companies turned a bulky, expensive piece of equipment into a compact, affordable, and essential office staple. We'll share stories of how faxes became the lifeblood of corporate communication, a rapid-fire way to send contracts, memos, and even personal messages across the world in minutes. This machine was the original "instant" communication device, a harbinger of the real-time world we now inhabit.

But as with all great empires, the fax machine's reign was not to last. We'll delve into the factors that led to its decline, from the rise of the internet and email in the mid-1990s to the eventual supremacy of digital documents. We'll discuss the moments when the fax became a symbol of corporate bureaucracy and a punchline for outdated technology.

So plug in your landline, listen for the beep, and join us as we send a final transmission to the incredible, and ultimately doomed, world of the fax machine. It’s a story of innovation, cultural impact, and the relentless march of technological progress.

Transcript

Kelly: 0:07

Imagine you hear a loud screeching noise, kind of thing. But it goes on and it's got this high pitched squeal that I can't even do because I can't I can't sing in that register. That's something that was pretty common in offices all around the US not too long ago. Now it wasn't a dial up modem, although it had a similar kind of vibe. You know what I'm talking about here?

Alex: 0:46

Well, you didn't do a great impression of that, and it wasn't a dial up modem. No, was it? Oh, was it a dot matrix printer?

Kelly: 0:59

No, no. I'm talking about the mating call of the magnificent and mysterious fax machine.

Alex: 1:05

Oh, yeah, fax machine Sure. Did you ever,

Kelly: 1:09

did you ever pick up a phone line when somebody was sending a fax? Yeah, yeah. You know that sound I'm talking about,

Alex: 1:19

yeah, similar to a dial Yes, yeah,

Kelly: 1:22

very similar to a dial up modem. Now, fax is short for facsimile, sure, which you know the origin of that word.

Alex: 1:31

It just means, like a copy, right? Like it's Latin

Kelly: 1:37

from fac simile, which is F, A, C, S, i, m, I, L, E. It means to make similar okay, but fax is the shortened version. But here's the real question that's gonna blow your mind. Do you know when the fax machine was invented?

Alex: 1:53

Well, that's what I was just gonna say. I have a feeling the fax machine is older than we think, and the technology quite amazing pre computers. Really pretty, pretty amazing technology, because then we have to think about like fax, like the original ones with fax paper and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I'm guessing that the fax machine was invented like in the 50s or 60s,

Kelly: 2:25

19 or 1819? 1950s, or 60s? Nope, nope. You got to go back a little further than that. Let me just give you a little bit of context. So the telegraph was invented in the 1830s by Samuel Morse.

Alex: 2:41

That's the one with the dots and the dashes, yes.

Kelly: 2:46

Morse code, sure, over the telegraph. And that was, you know, kind of an easy way. The way that worked is, it was just either electricity on or electricity off. It was binary, right? The fax machine, which was called at the time, the electric printing telegraph was invented in 1843, what? Yeah. Let that soak in for a second. Wow. And it was invented by a guy named Alexander Bain, who was a Scottish clock maker. He wasn't a tech mogul, he wasn't a he wasn't, it was kind of an inventor, but he was more of a clock maker. He also invented the first electric clock,

Alex: 3:27

wow, and had the same purpose to transmit a piece of paper to somebody else.

Kelly: 3:34

The Electric printing telegraph was based on all things pendulums. So if you can imagine a big pendulum that's hanging, you know, from from the ceiling or from a point above, and it's weighted so that it so that it slides back and forth, this pendulum would have a stylus on it, and the way you prepared the facts to send it, or the electric printing telegraph to send is you had a special piece of paper, that paper was treated with a chemical that was conductive, right? So it was electrically conductive, and then what you would do is you would actually draw on it with another chemical that was not electrically conductive. So what you've got is you've got the whole paper is conductive, and then you've, you've drawn this pattern on it that does not conduct electricity. Is that making sense so far? Yeah, yeah. So the pendulum had a stylus on it that was, was also conductive of electricity, and it would run over the paper. So it would, it would go back and forth across the paper. And whenever it got to the point where the drawing was where it wasn't conducting electricity, it would not transmit electricity. At that point, it would stop for that brief moment. The key was this guy, Alexander Bain, set up a second pendulum that would write onto. The same kind of paper, but it was receiving its instructions from the first piece of paper and the first pendulum, he would synchronize these pendulums so they swung at exactly the same speed and the same distance. And as the first one would go, it would basically transmit where there was an electrical current, and then it would stop just for ever so briefly where there wasn't one, and the one that was writing the receiving end would do the opposite, only, instead of reading, it was writing. Oh, that's

Alex: 5:31

cool. All the best technology at one point has a stylus involved, and then stylus always gets phased

Kelly: 5:37

out. Yeah, yeah. We should talk about the stylus sometime. But, yeah,

Alex: 5:41

record players have styluses, right? It was like,

Kelly: 5:46

it was like, basically this magical way of recreating a piece of art. You could you could do text, you could do a drawing, you could do anything, but you had to do is very fussy. It had a lot of things that had to go into it. So if you can imagine, you know, it wasn't regular ink and paper. It was a metal plate with usually made of copper, and the ink was this non conductive material like shellac or varnish, and it really required everything to go perfectly to work. Yeah, I'm guessing it wasn't very common. No, as a matter of fact, it kind of, it was demonstrated, and it was sort of magical for the receiver to see exactly what was drawn on the sender's paper. Yeah, but it was one of those machines that was kind of almost like, Wow. I can't believe they I can't believe this actually works, but it was clunky, slow and expensive, yeah, and and had to be synchronized perfectly in order for the two pendulums to work. So now, now Bane being a clock maker, synchronizing the pendulums was actually right up his alley, right as a clock maker. So it wasn't a commercial hit. It didn't really take off. And, you know, it's funny that you said that you were thinking the 1950s 1960s 1940s or whatever. Alexander Bain died poor in 1877 this didn't really make him any money. But this concept of being able to transmit a, I guess an image or text or whatever remained. And actually, the first commercial use of this was in the 1860s in Italy, there was a physicist and an Italian priest who developed this thing that was called the pan telegraph. And it was a similar fax kind of thing, using mechanical structures and electricity going on and off, much like Morse code, and it was used by banks to verify signatures. That was the initial use case. So if somebody signed something, the bank would know could look at it and see if it was a authentic signature. In 1924 the first transatlantic facts happened. And you know who was involved in that?

Alex: 8:06

Was it Bell? Calvin Coolidge? Oh, Calvin Coolidge, one

Kelly: 8:10

of the coolest names ever. A picture of Calvin Coolidge was sent from New York to London. Really? Yep, yep. Took 20 minutes.

Alex: 8:20

That was how he was involved. Or was he there? Like,

Kelly: 8:23

I don't actually know. Maybe they just happen to have a picture of you got a picture lying around? Yeah, I got Coolidge here. So 1924 20 minutes to send this picture across the pond. In 1944 they were using the same technology to transmit maps and things like that during D Day and during World War Two, really? I mean, if you think about it, how else would you transmit an image of a map at that time?

Alex: 8:51

Yeah, that's crazy, though, that we just you wouldn't think that it was, it seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't have been invented until later. Yeah,

Kelly: 9:00

yeah. Well, this, this was all still very crude, still very much a niche kind of thing. But in the 60s, Xerox actually was one of the big companies to sort of industrialize it, make it small enough to fit in an office and make it, you know, six pages a minute, or something like that. So it was, I'm sorry, actually six, six minutes per page was how long it took the Xerox tele copier. So you're waiting six minutes you get one page. Japan definitely had a lot of technology that was starting to make it cheaper, more reliable. This was kind of more in the 70s and 80s, and then it kind of peaked in the mid 90s. The the fax machine became in every office it, you know, was having its own dedicated phone lines. And again, this is a problem it. It did transmit over a regular phone line, but if you think about it, sharing a. Phone line with a fax machine is not cool, right,

Alex: 10:03

right? Because if you call it and it picks up, then you subject it to that tone that we open with.

Kelly: 10:09

Not only that, there was some of the original spam that was coming into people's inboxes was coming via fax. You imagine you've just loaded up your toner and your fax machine, you've got your paper all loaded in, and then you hear that noise, and then you start receiving this fax, or maybe you're out of the office, and you come back to receive a 50 page junk fax. Yeah, that's rough. They were still using that kind of thermal paper at the time, and so there was a lot of kind of chemical smells. Comes big, heavy roll, kind of like the mimeograph. Remember the mimeograph? Ditto paper, ditto paper. So nobody can say for sure, but the estimated peak of the facts you want to guess what year it was,

Alex: 10:56

probably night I'm saying 1992

Kelly: 11:01

little later, 97 really is what they're saying. Yeah, because that's around the time when email was starting to be used. Businesses were starting to, you know, it actually kind of got to the point where there was this office protocol where somebody would email something, and then the corporate policy was they were supposed to fax it. So then they would say, Well, let me fax it to your email. I mean, it was just kind of crazy, right,

Alex: 11:32

right, right? And there was, I remember, yeah, there still is some. Every now and then you'll run into something that, yeah, that will require a fax. Like, really,

Kelly: 11:41

right? So you have to have an E fax number, which is sort of like a digital zombie of the fax machine, right? So late 90s, the internet took off. Also the invention of the scanner, like the flatbed scanner, so you could scan and then the scanner printer, that was kind of the nail in the coffin.

Alex: 12:00

That was the last fax machines were the three in one, right,

Kelly: 12:03

right, right. But then all of a sudden, everybody realized, why do I need to take up a phone line when I can just scan this and email it or print it on the other end, the first anti spam laws were used during the late 80s to kind of help protect people from getting those jump junk faxes. They made them made sending them actually illegal, but really it was, they're still now. Now sometimes we pick dead ends that still actually exist, and fax machines do still exist. They're still around, but you know what they're used for today, primarily what industries use them?

Alex: 12:42

Probably legal law firms, yes, legal

Kelly: 12:45

and health care. And a lot of that has to do with like compliance laws, HIPAA laws and privacy laws and stuff like that. The fax machine is still considered more secure in a lot of ways, but if you think about it. I mean, if you're in a doctor's office and somebody faxes you somebody else's medical records, what's to stop somebody walking by from just picking up that

Alex: 13:09

paper? Right? Right? That's not HIPAA compliant now,

Kelly: 13:13

well, you have to have protocols in place, I guess, to make it HIPAA compliant. But it's, it's definitely the healthcare system and the the legal you know, the lawyers offices that are keeping it awake, and I guess the government, too, still uses some paper trails for faxes. You know

Alex: 13:30

what? I've always wondered. You know that company called Carfax? Yes, yes. And the idea is you can get information about a used car that you're about to buy. You just feed it the VIN number, and it gives you, like, the history of the car. I wonder if so, that's companies. It's C, A, R, F, A, X, yeah. And I don't know if it's because it's it's facts about the car, or if, when it first started, they would send you a fax about

Kelly: 14:01

the with the facts they would fax you with a fax,

Alex: 14:05

right? I've, every time I see a CARFAX commercial, I get more invested in that question. I've even looked it up, but I've couldn't find anything.

Kelly: 14:15

Oh, yeah, that's that is a mystery for another time, my friend. But yeah, when's the last time you sent a fax or received a fax,

Alex: 14:22

embarrassingly, probably, probably since you have, it seems like I'm always running into something where somebody requires a fax copy of something we just had. We had a fax machine until, gosh, last two or three years at your house, yeah. I mean, not using it, just taking up space. You know, was

Kelly: 14:45

it within 15 feet of you

Alex: 14:47

and not currently, but yeah, I mean, I guarantee we didn't, well, I bet you we didn't throw it away. I bet you it's in this house somewhere

Kelly: 14:55

along with your 100 disc, CD changer. Yeah, that's 15 feet. Yeah. Well, that's the facts. Jack, Yeah, glad that one's gone. You.

Unknown: 15:26

Is older than the phones we hold, a model of wires, brave and bold, a symphony of screeches, a digital screen, the fax machine, the unsung dream. Yeah, fax it over, send it through paper. Whispers, just for you. Oh to the mighty fax machine. The I spat out memos, contracts too, in offices where plants barely grew, it hummed with pride. It knew its worth, connecting worlds across the earth. Now it waits a relic, unseen, a dusty ghost, a fax machine, and fax it over, send it through people, whispers just for for you, beef and buzz. Oh, what a scene. Oh to the mighty fax machine, Beanie Babies and floppy disks, the 90s gold nostalgia risks, but in the corner still Serena lives the legend, the fax machine. The fax machine. Yeah, up, send it through paper. Whispers just for you beef and buzzing over to the Mighty fax machine. Now, fax it over. Just for you.