History of Work - The Fax Machine

The fax machine has been around for much less time than the calculator or the typewriter, but you might be surprised to discover how long it’s been here: just over 181 years. If you work in a very modern office, you may be similarly surprised to discover it’s still going strong: 

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fax machines are still widely used in Germany, which still relies heavily on paper-based filing: a 2023 survey suggested 80% of businesses still used fax machines. Japan is similarly besotted, to the point where a Covid-era attempt by the government to phase out fax machines was scrapped following a user outcry. It was impossible, offices claimed, because too many people still relied on hand-written documents and using physical hanko seals to approve them. 

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The first trace of this dependency dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when Scottish engineer Alexander Bain was granted a patent in 1843 for an “Electric Printing Telegraph”, which relied on swinging pendulums to scan messages, send them down a telegraph cable, and print them out at the other end using chemically treated paper. It was the first device that could transmit a document via an electrical signal, and thus qualifies as the first fax machine. 

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As with most engineering firsts, it was a complicated design - messages had to be spelled out using pins on a cylinder - and not a very effective one because it required transmitter and receiver to be perfectly synchronised, which was very hard to do. It was another eighteen years before an Italian inventor named Giovanni Caselli developed a “Pantelegraph” system with a synchronised clock that enabled reliable transmission.

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It came at a price: the machinery was enormous. The pendulum weighed eight kilograms, the pantelegraph machine was two metres high, and it could only scan things written on metal plates of 111mm by 27mm - about the size of two raffle tickets, which was good for around 25 words per message. But it worked, mostly for transmitting signatures for documents, and it heralded a rush of new machines with steampunk names and various significant operational limitations.

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Shelford Bidwell’s 1881 “Tele-photography” pioneered the scanning of a photo to a digital signal, but had the same synchronisation problems as Bain. Elisha Gray’s 1888 “teleautograph” enabled the movement of a pen in one device to be reproduced exactly by another it was connected to: it was a hit with bankers and doctors, who relied on signatures, but was impractical for longer documents. Ernest A. Hummel's 1895 “Telediagraph” could transmit pictures, but only over a dedicated circuit. 

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It wasn’t until 1913 that the French-made Belinographé enabled the transmission of not-particularly-high-quality photos over a phone line, followed in 1924 by RCA’s “radiofacsimile” which used a radio signal: advances in both were driven by wire services like the Associated Press, which relied on them to feed the vast newspaper industry, and lead to the invention of a broadly portable machine in 1936. 

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Its use outside the media business was limited: the machines were expensive, slow and not
terribly reliable. Most businesses were happy to rely on telegram, teletype or telephone for urgent text, or the post for everything else, and that didn’t change for decades. It wasn’t until 1964 that Xerox introduced the Long Distance Xerography system, the first business fax machine, built on the roaring success of its photocopier business. It could send entire documents at a reasonable clip - eight pages in a minute - but it was still big, complicated, expensive and required a dedicated data line. It remained the preserve of a small number of businesses and industries that needed it.

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The first real breakthrough in fax machines came two years later in 1966, when Xerox debuted the Magnafax Telecopier, a desktop design that worked with your existing phone line and could transmit a single letter in a mere six minutes. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was something like the smallest, and it was useful enough to introduce “faxing” to the business lexicon. 

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Meanwhile, over in Lockheed’s missile factory in California, two engineers realised that the technology they’d developed for sending high-resolution photos back from space would also send data over phone lines much faster than anything offered by Xerox or its rivals. They quit to launch their own company, Dacom, which shipped the first digital fax machine before the decade was out. 

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The technology was finally in place, and businesses were starting to catch on to the value of being able to transmit entire documents easily. There was particular enthusiasm in Japan, home of a blossoming electronics industry and multiple written languages, whose manufacturers embraced the fax machine in the 1970s. But it would take another ten years before the tipping point.

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The missing link was compatibility. The Magnafax only transmitted to other Magnafaxes; US fax machines couldn’t transmit to European ones and vice versa. The breakthrough was the Group 3 fax standard ratified in 1980, followed by the even faster Group 4 standard in 1984. Suddenly any page could be sent anywhere in the world in less than a minute. The fax machine almost immediately became a key office tool worldwide.

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In many of them it’s stayed there, well beyond the point at which the computer technically surpassed it. Its ubiquity, simplicity and reliability means that many businesses haven’t felt the need to upgrade - for now, anyway. (In the UK, as of 2023 phone companies are no longer required to provide fax services, so that reliability can’t be taken for granted.)

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The heaviest fax user is the USA, driven largely by the healthcare, legal and finance industries. The former is estimated to send 9 billion faxes a year, and the fax format is still so ubiquitous that number is projected to grow by over 11% a year until 2028 - albeit increasingly powered not by machines on desks, but by digital fax providers, which offer additional security features required by laws like the USA’s HIPAA. Encryption, VOIP connections and digital storage is a lot more effective than making sure than verifying fax numbers and making sure the printouts aren’t left in a public corner of the office, but the fax machine stays in the picture because it’s what people are used to - and, crucially, it’s interoperable with every business because every office has a fax machine.  

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That’s the same approach we take at Workiro. Upgrading business systems shouldn’t be driven by ditching things for the sake of it, but by finding solutions that solve real problems, and working with the tools your teams use already. By integrating document sharing and approval securely within Office365 and Oracle NetSuite, Workiro enables you to share documents and track approvals across your organisation and your clients as well, with every file and email monitored from a single interface to give you total visibility.

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If your business still relies on fax machines, switching to Workiro could give you a secure and fully compliant way to share documents to clients and customers while dramatically cutting your admin time. To find out more, join a group demo or chat to one of our team.