Fax Machine
History
The Fax Machine was originally invented in 1843 by Alexander Bain. As to be expected with the technology of the time it was nothing like the fax machines of today. Bain used a series of "pendulums" and a "clock" to scan the document line by line. It was then transferred over, and the image was reproduced. It took a long time and the quality of the reproduction wasn't great, but it was a feat by the standards of the time.
Then Frederick Bakewell took that design and modified it to use “rotating cylinders” and a “stylus” to create the faxes. His design appeared at the World's Fair in London in 1851. While it was not a huge hit, it did gain some curious eyes and it would go on to serve as the blueprint for the fax machines to come
In the late 1860s, Giovanni Caselli had created the Pantelegraph. It was a huge hit and would become the basis for the modern-day fax machine. But the modern fax machine would not even begin to take off until almost a century later.
One of the next big steps that would occur was in 1964 when the company Xerox would create the Long Distance Xerograph (LDX), which had the capabilities of faxing a single sheet of paper to any fax machine in the world. It took about six minutes for the document to send, but it was a huge step forward and would remain at the forefront of faxing until a Japanese telecommunications corporation created the “ITU G3 Facsimile Standard” in 1980.
In the '80s and '90s, there was a huge rise in the usage of analog fax machines. With the analog fax machines, you only had to plug into a phone line and the fax machines worked. This was great in the time before the internet had taken off. This allowed companies to send anything they needed without the internet, which was still pretty new at the time. But the costs to keep them up and running were getting higher and higher, so companies struggled to keep up with them.
Mixing and adding other functions to the fax machine was supposed to help with the costs, but in a lot of cases, it didn't help at all. The prices got larger and were not sustainable for most companies.
Disappearance
As the internet began to grow in popularity, it became a lot more readily available. It was a much cheaper experience to use the internet services instead of all of the machinery. Fax machines are still around and are in use, but there are new ways to send faxes. Anytime you use your phone to send a picture and send it with the signature, you are sending a fax in a new way. The need to send documents is one that has existed since documents have, and it will continue forever with businesses especially. But technology is constantly expanding and adding the functions of one thing into something else. So, as fax machines begin to disappear, it isn't that we don't need fax machines but it is that we have added them to other technologies.
Link to Presentation
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C6Vjk-jcChtdjMCxQ5v3W2KyfzH4IXxh2-f-Tqi0m54/edit?usp=sharing
References
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