The Fax Boom that came a Century Late
by Lars Fimmerstad
While Queen Victoria never actually said, "I'll drop you a fax," she might well have done so if the history of telecommunications had taken a slightly different turn. The principle for facsimile transmission over wires was first patented as early as 1843 by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain only seven years after the invention of the electric telegraph.
Bain himself never performed a fax transmission, but it is clear from his patent application for "improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs," that his invention made facsimile transmission entirely feasible.
Bain's invention used two electric pendulums, one at each end of the wire. Each of the pendulums was made to oscillate synchronously over a rotating roll. The sender wrote the text of his message using an electrically conductive material, then wrapped the message round the roll. As the pendulum swung over the paper, the transmitting needle picked up impulses where there was text, but no impulse where there was a gap in the text. At the other end of the line, the receiving needle made marks on photosensitive paper corresponding to the signals from the sending needle, thus reproducing the text being transmitted.
Proof that Bain's principle was sound was eventually provided by Frederick Blakewell, an English physicist, who demonstrated a working facsimile machine at the World Exhibition of 1851, the largest exhibition of new technology ever held. His device was based on the same principle as Bain's design, also using rotating cylinders and styluses for recording and writing. So Queen Victoria could indeed have sent a fax, had she been so inclined, when she visited the exhibition in the huge Crystal Palace!
Fax machine commercialized
However, it is a far cry from merely demonstrating a device at an exhibition to making it into a commercial success. The honor of designing the first fax service in actual use goes to Giovanni Caselli, an Italian abbot, born in Siena in 1815, who turned his hand to science and was, by 1849, editing a scientific magazine. In 1856 he claimed that he had developed a device, which he called a "pantelegraph," that could send facsimiles of images and text.
Caselli received enthusiastic support from the French emperor, Napoleon III, who personally visited Caselli's workshop in 1860. He ensured that Caselli had access to the telegraph lines he needed, and a commercial fax service was inaugurated in Paris in 1865. It transmitted pictures and text between major French cities for some five years. A Pantelegraph Society was also founded in order to promote the new invention, which attracted extensive and enthusiastic press coverage at the time.
When Caselli succeeded in opening a regularly working fax connection between Paris and Lyons, he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by Napoleon III. There still exist fully legible copies of letters sent by facsimile during this period, and a few contemporary facsimile machines are displayed in French museums.
After Caselli's fax service achieved worldwide renown in the 1860s, he was invited by King Victor Emmanuel of Italy to demonstrate the fax machine at a world exhibition in Turin. He also made successful experimental fax transmissions between London and Manchester, and a company was founded to start regular services. However, it was swept away by the bank crisis of 1864.
Success shortlived
Even the Emperor of China heard about the pantelegraph and sent officials to Paris to study the technology. The Chinese realized the advantages of the fax principle for text written in Chinese, which, with its thousands of ideograms, created insuperable problems for the conventional telegraph. However, the negotiations between Peking and Caselli petered out without yielding fruit.
Sadly enough, Caselli's invention was introduced at a time when the World had started to invest heavily in conventional telegraph services. The French telegraph authorities, for example, apparently disfavored Caselli's fax principle and instead promoted development of the already dominant Morse telegraph system.
In the minds of the public, the pantelegraph was associated exclusively with the transmission of images. The advantages of also using it to send text were only dimly perceived in the 1860s.
The Pantelegraph company in Paris did little to improve the situation, making only feeble efforts to promote its services. Convinced of the superiority of its technology, it was content to wait for investors to appear. None did, however, and the Pantelegraph company was eventually squeezed out of the market - an early example of how a new and superior technology failed to gain a foothold because an earlier technology was already established.
Caselli's invention subsequently fell into disuse and he died a disappointed man in Florence in 1891.
Modest progress
The fax made progress nevertheless. Dr Arthur Korn, a German scientist, invented the principle of photoelectric reading in 1902. By 1910 newspapers were regularly sending and receiving pictures between major cities in Europe. In 1922, Dr Korn managed to transmit images between Europe and the U.S. by radio. In the U.S. of the Roaring Twenties, the fax was expected to become a common household appliance and millions of dollars were spent on developing it.
However, the anticipated breakthrough did not occur, and it was not until the 1960s that the fax machine spread from the offices of the leading newspapers to become a familiar item of equipment in other business sectors.
Electronics companies, meanwhile, were preoccupied with other, seemingly more glamorous, inventions, such as television, and it was some time before fax machines became mutually compatible and reasonably priced. In 1970, there were no more than 50,000 facsimile machines in the entire USA. But by 1948, the AT&T fax system could be incorporated in a desktop fax and transmit a 15 x 20 cm photograph in seven minutes.
Breakthrough at last
The Japanese state telecom was the pioneer in opening its lines to public fax machines - not surprisingly, considering the advantages that the fax machine offers for transmitting text in a language with as many letters as Japanese, a nightmare to write on a teleprinter. The Japanese were drawing the practical conclusions of what the Chinese emperor had realized almost a century earlier.
This was the start of the brief but intense heyday of the fax, which has radically changed our ways of communicating, only to be progressively replaced by direct communication between computers.
It is intriguing to speculate about the enormous consequences for business and news services, not to mention homes, that an early breakthrough for Caselli's pantelegraph might have had. With telephone lines already spanning the world, the technology for the fax revolution was in place one hundred years ago. So it is not too far-fetched, after all, to imagine Queen Victoria faxing off her order for Scottish salmon!
Sources: Telecommunications Museum, Stockholm; Musée des arts et métiers, Paris.
Source: http://www.ericsson.com/Connexion/connexion2-96/fax.html
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