The history
180 years of sending pages down a wire, from swinging pendulums to packets on the internet.
Fax is older than the telephone. In 1843 a Scottish clockmaker patented a way to scan a page line by line and redraw it far away, and by 1865 France ran a public fax service. Photos by wire made news pictures travel in the 1920s, and in 1980 the Group 3 standard made fax digital, cheap and everywhere.
1843
Patent for scanning and sending an image
Alexander Bain, United Kingdom
1865
Public fax service
Pantelegraph, Paris–Lyon, France
1906
Photograph sent by wire over 1,800 km
Arthur Korn, Germany
1924
Photos sent over the telephone network
AT&T, Cleveland to New York, USA
1964
Modern commercial fax machine
Xerox LDX, USA
1980
Digital fax standard (Group 3, T.4)
CCITT, Geneva
1998
Fax over IP standard (T.38)
ITU-T, Geneva
1843 – 1900
Inventors use pendulums, drums and chemically treated paper to copy handwriting over telegraph lines. France runs the first public fax service.
1843
27 May 1843
Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented a way to copy a pattern over telegraph wires. Two pendulums, kept in step by clocks, swept a probe across metal pins line by line, and the receiver marked paper soaked in chemicals wherever current flowed.
Why it mattered. It already had the two big fax ideas: scan line by line, and keep both ends in step. His machines were never truly synchronised, so the copies were poor.
1848
Frederick Bakewell improved on Bain with rotating cylinders at each end, a design later called the image telegraph. He showed it at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.
Why it mattered. Spinning drums scanned more evenly than swinging pendulums, and drums stayed in fax and wirephoto machines for a century.
1860
November 1860
Italian priest and physicist Giovanni Caselli tested his pantelegraph on a telegraph line from Paris to Amiens, about 140 km. The image sent was the signature of the composer Gioacchino Rossini.
Why it mattered. It proved a picture or handwriting could survive a real long-distance line.
1865
The French telegraph service opened a pantelegraph service between Paris and Lyon, extended to Marseille in 1867. Pendulums kept the machines in step, and the receiving paper was soaked in potassium ferricyanide, which darkened where current passed. It mostly carried signatures and handwritten messages.
Why it mattered. Fax was offered to the public, and paid for, more than a decade before the telephone was invented.
1873
While testing undersea cables, engineer Willoughby Smith found that selenium conducts electricity better when light shines on it.
Why it mattered. A material that turns light into an electrical signal made it possible to scan photographs, not just raised or inked patterns.
1900 – 1960
Light-sensitive cells scan photographs. Newspapers and news agencies send pictures across countries and oceans the same day.
1906
17 October 1906
Physicist Arthur Korn used a selenium cell to scan a photograph and sent a picture of the German Crown Prince over about 1,800 km of wire. His telephotography networks soon linked newspapers in Berlin, Paris and London.
Why it mattered. News photos could now travel faster than trains, and newspapers started to use them.
1913
Édouard Belin built a portable picture transmitter that scanned with a photocell and could send over ordinary telephone lines. Reporters could carry it to the story.
Why it mattered. Its principle became the basis of the wirephoto services of the next decades.
1921
The Bartlane system coded photographs as punched tape and sent them by submarine telegraph cable between London and New York. A picture that took a week by ship took hours.
Why it mattered. Pictures had become data: numbers for shades of grey, the same idea a digital fax uses.
1924
19 May 1924
AT&T sent 15 photographs by telephone line from Cleveland to New York, good enough for newspapers to print. A commercial service followed in 1925.
Why it mattered. The telephone network, not just the telegraph, now carried pictures, which is what every later office fax used.
1935
1 January 1935
The Associated Press opened its Wirephoto network. Its first picture showed a plane crash in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
Why it mattered. Newspapers everywhere could print a photo of a news event on the same day.
1955
1950s
Western Union placed small Desk-Fax machines in tens of thousands of businesses to send and receive telegrams as pictures. By one history, over 40,000 were in use.
Why it mattered. It was the first time fax machines sat on ordinary office desks.
1960 – 1985
Fax moves onto ordinary phone lines and office desks. World standards arrive, ending with digital Group 3.
1980
Group 3 made fax digital: 1,728 dots a line, 3.85 or 7.7 lines per mm, Modified Huffman compression and a standard handshake. A page took well under a minute; at 9,600 bit/s, a typical page takes about 10 seconds.
Why it mattered. Nearly every fax machine and fax modem since speaks Group 3. The chapters of this box are its rules.
By the numbers
From six minutes to about ten seconds, thanks to digital coding, compression and faster modems.
1985 – 2000
Cheap Japanese machines, faster modems and plain paper put a fax in almost every office, and in India's STD/PCO booths.
1985
1985–1990
Cheap Group 3 machines, nearly all made in Japan, flooded offices. In the United States the number installed grew from about 500,000 in 1985 to about 5 million in 1990. Every new machine made the others more useful.
Why it mattered. By the end of the 1980s a fax number was printed on business cards next to the phone number.
1985
GammaLink is credited with the first fax board for personal computers, so a PC could send and receive faxes without paper.
Why it mattered. Fax began to move inside computers, the first step towards fax servers and fax-to-email.
1987
Canon is credited with the first plain-paper fax machine, printing with a laser engine instead of on thermal paper. Plain-paper machines took over in the 1990s.
Why it mattered. Faxes no longer curled up or faded in a drawer.
1990
c. 1987–2000s
From the late 1980s, yellow STD/ISD/PCO booths spread across India, run by local shopkeepers. One count put the booths at over 12 lakh (1.2 million) in the early 2000s. Many also offered fax, so small traders could send order forms and documents without a line of their own. Mobile phones emptied them after about 2008.
Why it mattered. For millions of Indians the neighbourhood booth was their first fax machine, as well as their first long-distance phone.
1991
The V.17 modem standard used trellis-coded modulation to reach 14,400 bit/s on ordinary phone lines, 50% faster than V.29's 9,600.
Why it mattered. It became the everyday top speed of office fax machines.
By the numbers
Slow growth for decades, then a tenfold jump in five years once cheap Group 3 machines arrived.
1998 – today
Email takes over, but fax rides on over the internet with T.38, and survives in hospitals, courts and government offices.
1998
ITU-T approved T.38 for real-time fax over IP networks. Gateways turn the fax sound into data and send it in packets with copies of earlier ones, so a lost packet doesn't ruin the page. T.37, for sending fax as email, came the same year.
Why it mattered. It let fax keep working as telephone networks moved onto the internet.
2000
By one history, sales of fax machines peaked around 2000. Email and scanned PDFs took over much of the traffic after that.
Why it mattered. The fax began a long decline, but did not disappear.
2017
July 2017
England's health service was reported to be the world's largest purchaser of fax machines. In December 2018 the government banned it from buying new ones from January 2019 and set 31 March 2020 as the date to phase them out.
Why it mattered. It showed how long fax lasts in hospitals, where a phone number and a delivery report feel safe.
2021
Japan's government asked ministries to stop using fax. It met strong resistance, with ministries raising hundreds of objections about security and practicality.
Why it mattered. Fax still survives in some offices because it is simple, familiar and trusted.
2026
Today
Fax lives on in clinics, courts, pharmacies and government offices, often as T.38 over the internet or as online fax services that turn pages into emails.
Why it mattered. A 180-year-old idea, scan a page line by line and keep both ends in step, is still at work.
Did you know?
Fax is older than the telephone: France ran a public fax service from 1865, eleven years before Bell's telephone patent.
A Group 3 fax sees an A4 page as about 2 million black or white dots, and squeezes a typical letter 10 to 20 times.
The screech of a fax call is a real conversation: two machines agreeing on speed, paper size and resolution before the page is sent.
Thermal fax paper needs no ink: the dots turn black when a tiny heater warms the coating to about 100 °C.
In 2017 England's health service was said to be the world's biggest buyer of fax machines.
The people
1810 – 1877 · Clockmaker and inventor · Scotland
Patented the first image-scanning telegraph in 1843, using synchronised pendulums.
1800 – 1869 · Physicist and inventor · England
Replaced Bain's pendulums with spinning drums and showed his image telegraph in 1851.
1815 – 1891 · Priest and physicist · Italy
Built the pantelegraph that carried the world's first public fax service, from 1865.
1870 – 1945 · Physicist · Germany
Used selenium cells to send photographs by wire, and built networks for newspapers.
1876 – 1963 · Engineer · France
His portable Bélinographe sent photos over telephone lines and inspired later wirephoto services.
born 1942 · Telecom engineer and policy maker · India
Led C-DOT and the telecom push that helped STD/PCO booths spread across India.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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