Was the fax machine really invented before the telephone?

Yes. The principle of the fax was patented by the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain on 27 May 1843, roughly 33 years before the telephone patent of 1876. Sources differ slightly on how to describe the device, since it was an electric printing telegraph that could reproduce marks and simple images, not an office fax machine. The first commercial service followed in 1865, also before the telephone. [1] [2] [3]

Bain worked from the telegraph, which by the 1830s let people send information over wires. He wondered whether images, and not only signals, could travel the same way. His design used two pendulums kept in step at a distance by an electromagnet. A contact on the sending pendulum swept over a copper version of the picture, and each touch of the copper sent an electrical impulse down the wire. At the far end, a matching pendulum swung over chemically treated paper that darkened when energized. Both the original and the paper moved forward by 1 millimeter after each swing, so the picture was built up line by line. [4]

A column in the San Diego Reader describes a similar scanning arrangement and corrects a popular mix-up: Bain was a clockmaker who grew up on a farm, not a shepherd. The shepherd story appears to have been confused with the origin of golf. [5]

The San Diego Reader notes that sending text by Morse code was faster, and few people wanted to transmit anything else, so Bain set the idea aside. It says he died obscure and penniless after others took up his inventions. The wunderfeed summary stresses that Bain patented a principle, and that the illustrated version dates from an improved design of 1850. [5] [3]

Frederick Bakewell improved on Bain's design. Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph then opened the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon in 1865, about 11 years before the telephone. In 1880 Shelford Bidwell built a scanning phototelegraph that could handle any two-dimensional original. Electricscotland adds that faxes found a major use around 1906, sending photographs for newspapers. [6] [2]

Fax machines moved onto telephone lines much later. Xerox introduced what many consider the first commercialized modern fax machine in 1964, and a smaller 46 pound model, the Magnafax Telecopier, followed in 1966. Historian Jonathan Coopersmith notes that the basic function, scanning line by line and printing at the receiver, has stayed the same since the 1840s. One source also dates a modern fax demonstration to 1947 and links it to the Muirhead company, while others point to the 1960s for commercial success, so the dating of the later milestones is less consistent in these results. [6] [1] [4]