Inside The Technology Of Faxing

By Author: Chris Haycox
Total Articles: 4762
Comment this article

Most modern stories about the fax machine talk about the Xerox company, and a few of its employees, as if they invented not only the photocopier but the fax machine, as well. This is true in the sense that they built new products based on existing ideas and technology, but not in the strict sense of who really invented faxing. The technology used in the fax machine took a long, circuitous route to get to a product that today's office worker would recognize.

A German inventor named Arthur Korn invented what he called telephotography in 1902. He devised an electro-optical means of breaking photographs down into tiny elements and transmitting those over wires. History records that he sent what we would call a fax in 1907, between Munich and Berlin. It was a photograph, and it came through clearly enough to excite many people, including other inventors and engineers. Many of them went right to work trying to perfect the technology and bring a product to market.

Making a beeline, literally

The Frenchman Edouard Beeline named the Belinograph after himself, of course. His invention worked by affixing an image to ...
... a rotating cylinder and then scanning it with a powerful beam of light. By using a photoelectric cell that would convert either light or its absence into electrical impulses that could be transmitted, the Belinograph established the basic processes used ever since for what would be called fax machines. Although his product did not take the world by storm, Beeline's technology was the foundation on which all subsequent facsimile transmitters would be based.

Although today's faxes owe their basic operational design to the Belinograph, the technology has changed and evolved greatly over the intervening years. Many companies around the world attempted to develop a high-quality, dependable and low-cost fax machine, and there were many market failures along the way. In the 1950s, as the firm also worked on a related technology for photocopying, the Xerox firm entered the competition. Xerox would make many important discoveries along the way to producing one of the first mass-market-ready fax machines.

From oddity to necessity

Even when firms (before Xerox) had marketed fax machines, they were always quite expensive, quite finicky and very expensive to operate. It was not until Xerox developed a smaller model in the mid-1960s, and built it to work quickly over existing phone lines, that the fax machine made inroads into businesses. It is almost humorous to think of today, but when Xerox got their models to scan, convert and transmit a one-page document in under six minutes in 1966, it was a newsworthy event. Still, it took another decade and a half to refine and improve the technology, until fax machines evolved into reasonably priced, reliable business tools.

When the Japanese entered the fax market, they quickly developed faster, smaller and easy-to-use machines that made the most of the technology at the lowest cost. In addition to the early American firms in the fax field, such as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, a long list of Japanese (and then Korean) firms saw the potential and put their Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba labels on many different models.

Into the future

Fax technology can be used for sending photos, drawings, printed materials and other documents by several different means today, not merely standalone pieces of hardware. The most common way, of course, is still to send the fax over a phone line, but we are already getting used to sending and receiving faxes with e-mail, handheld computers, iPad-type devices and even mobile phones. Radio, satellite and cable communications systems are also able to handle fax transmissions.

There are good reasons for all of these technologies to be in use, as the range of needs and types of equipment around the world are vast and impossible to quantify. You may be somewhere with only a standalone fax machine available, or you may have to receive a transmission from someone who only has a Web-connected computer and no machine. With the varieties of technology available, and all kinds of options, you will never have to work very hard to send or receive a fax.

The online faxing services, in particular, point the way to a slicker, faster, more reliable future of facsimile transmission. With digitized fax files that can be displayed without printing, there will be tremendous savings in paper, toner, energy and time. While most of the business world is moving toward this communications model, smart business owners will always keep a fax machine on hand, just in case, because they want customers, and potential ones, to reach them anyway they can. Even as the virtual world overtakes the physical (and older) one, it's wise to keep a hand reached back to the past for those who are not moving quite as fast into the future. Fax technology, put to work many different ways, makes this possible.
About Author:
Metro Hi Speed is a leader in internet fax solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services - you'll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions.