By John Toth
The Bulletin
I was looking over one of my monthly statements and found a charge for faxing services. It was only a few dollars.
Old habits are hard to change, and this one is so cheap that it’s worth keeping around, even if a few months go by without using it.
But for all practical purposes, the fax machine has gone the way of Blockbuster and the 8-track tape cartridge.
But who knows? There may be someone out there who still relies on faxing rather than sending email or social media messages.
When we started the paper in 1994, there was no widespread knowledge of the Internet, and fax machines ruled. We got a lot of our ads faxed over on a dedicated line, and we faxed back proofs for approval.
We used heat-sensitive waxed paper back in those days, which made the faxes last for about a year before fading.
When I was interning for a monthly entertainment magazine in 1979, I was told by an editor to transmit an article from the East Coast to the West Coast, to be edited there. I used what was then the predecessor to the modern fax machine. I think they called it the telefax.
I put the article on a cylinder and set an arm over it that sensed the white and dark spots on the page as the cylinder turned. The receiver on the West Coast had a blank sheet revolving on a cylinder on the other end, and the arm there distributed the ink according to the signals received from the arm on the East Coast.
That was dandy for 1979, but there were problems. The information transferred over very slowly, and we used a long-distance call to send the information during business hours. That took a few dollars.
If the connection terminated in the middle of the send, we had to find out where it stopped and continued from there. It was a big mess, and the machine had to be watched the entire time to make sure that it worked properly.
“What are you doing?” asked another editor who stopped by. “Do you know how much that costs?”
I did not, but I assumed that it wasn’t cheap.
We stopped the process after the second time the line disconnected and wound up overnighting the article. Guess who had to rush the envelope to the post office? The intern.
We’ve come a long way since then, but The Bulletin still has an all-in-one printer that is connected to a landline. You never know when something like that will be needed again. But I can’t remember the last time it was used for faxing.
This column would not be complete without a quick look on the Internet machine to delve into the history of the fax machine.
• 1843: Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented the first fax machine, which used pendulums and electric signals to scan and transmit images over telegraph lines.
• 1880: English inventor Shelford Bidwell created the first telefax machine that could scan two-dimensional originals.
• 1904: Arthur Korn of Germany transmitted the first fax by telephone.
• 1964: Xerox patented the first recognizable version of the telephone fax.
• 1993: Adobe released the Portable Document Format (PDF), which made email a faster way to send documents.
• 2010: Internet faxing emerged, using cloud-based servers and internet connectivity to transmit documents digitally.
The Bulletin fax line is (866) 844-5288. It is a free call, unlike my coast-to-coast send in 1979.
Fax us something, just for the fun of it. If we find it funny or interesting, we’ll run it in the paper.
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