{"id":36010,"date":"2013-10-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newrcblog.wpengine.com\/fax-technology-from-the-1840s-to-the-present\/"},"modified":"2024-08-15T08:53:37","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T15:53:37","slug":"fax-technology-from-the-1840s-to-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/us\/en\/blog\/fax-technology-from-the-1840s-to-the-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Fax Technology From the 1840s to the Present"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you ever wonder how people survived in the past without a certain technology?<\/p>\n

Send a fax online<\/a>, for example, and you may find yourself reflecting on life before faxing. The introduction of the fax machine shifted how the world works. Its arrival pre-empted the fast-paced business world of the contact center<\/a>, virtual call center<\/a>, IVR<\/a> system, business phone service<\/a> and video call<\/a> features we know today.<\/p>\n

Before fax machines came onto the scene, sending\u00a0a document required hiring a courier or package delivery service – especially if the document needed to arrive the next day.<\/p>\n

Deliveries within the same geographic area were fairly quick, but what if you wanted to get a file from, say, Los Angeles to Seattle? Very rarely would it happen overnight, unless you sent one of your employees to Seattle (and even that might be pushing it).<\/p>\n

\"Telegraph
A model of a telegraph machine – the technical precursor to the first fax machine-like device.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Luckily, the fax machine has changed all of that. While faxes didn’t become mainstream until the 1980s, the technology behind faxing was actually created in 1843 by a little-known Scotsman named Alexander Bain. Bain adapted the telegraph machine – invented just eight years earlier in 1835 – by making “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs”.<\/p>\n

Bain’s device used a stylus mounted on a pendulum that would scan a flat metal surface containing images.\u00a0Since the mid-1800s, the fax machine has been improved upon by many different inventors:<\/p>\n