Just curious-
In the earlier part of the 20th century, in the pre-fax, per telex, pre-xerox days, how could a daily B&W, or Sunday color comic strip like say, Flash Gordon or the Katzenjammer Kids etc., get copied and delivered to many different papers for printing and publication on the same day. Was it some sort of photographic process?
Couldn’t they have just mailed or couriered them a week or two before they were supposed to be printed?
I assume they could have used mimeographs to make copies.
BTW, fax machines predate even the telephone.
Just a nitpick but the fax machine was invented in the 1840’s. Not that it has much relevance to this but it was possible to transmit images very early on. It is a cool fact anyway.
Beaten by seconds. Damn you Telemark. That was my obscure fun fact of the day.
No cite, but I remember reading once where cartoonists would mail out a week’s worth of strips at one time a week or so in advance.
Obviously though it was probably their publisher that took care of making the copies and sending them out to the various newspapers and magazines for publication.
By mail, I’m sure. Considering that’s how it was done well into the 1980s, at least. A two-to-six-week advance schedule was typical. So the cartoonist drew the strips six weeks in advance, mailed/handed them to the syndicate, who would have used a photolithographic process to duplicate the strips. Then the syndicate would mail the duplicates to each newspaper, well in advance of the publication date (probably a week or two ahead). Then the newspapers held onto the strips until the appropriate day, and ran them in that paper.
I remember back in the 60s, ad copy came with 3-D paper mache mold. You’d give it to the newspaper and they’d pour lead into it to form a slug for printing.
Comic strips would work the same way: the syndicate could make a mold of the strip from the original lead slug, then mail it to the subscribers. Color comics would have molds for all four colors. Comics were done several weeks in advance to give the mail plenty of time to reach the destinations. The subscribers would then use the mold to set their type.
Later, with phototypesetting, it was even easier.
Even as late as the 1990s, I worked at a newspaper that received cartoons and comic strips through the regular mail and through express mail services.
Jut because an invention existed in early form doesn’t mean that it was technically viable or actually used widely. You’d have a tough time showing that there was any major use of fax machines in the 19th century or well into the 20th.
As others have said, neither the mimeograph nor the fax machine was the mechanism for transmitting copies of anything that ever had to be reprinted. Their quality was beyond awful.
All we were doing was pointing out that the idea that the early 1900’s was pre-fax machine was incorrect. Since no one suggested that it was used for sending comic strips (or anything for that matter) to newspapers, I don’t think I’d be very concerned with showing that it was. 
At a lot of newspapers, the cartoons and comic strips were left with the compositors (sometimes called “typesetters” or “paste-up guys”) who pasted up the non-copy sections well in advance. Every once in a while, the reading public would go into a tizzy when comic strips were accidentally run out of order. It was interesting to see at such times what the public at large really cared about.
Hm. This is all very well… but what about editorial comics / drawings / cartoons, the ones with a political / satirical edge (we have them in Australia, I assume they are int he US as well?).
These are usually topical to today’s news (or yesterdays). How’d they get THEM to syndicated papers all over the US in a timely fashion? Or did they just employ local people to provide that service?
Historically, each paper had its own in-house editorial cartoonist. More recently, papers have relied on express delivery services.
What Ascenray said, plus a few days delay. (That is, they send them to the syndicate the day they’re drawn, then the syndicate sends them out to members–much like important photographs were likely distributed in the old days.) Heck, even now many newspapers (and Newsweek magazine) re-run editorial cartoons from the syndicates a day or a week or so after they first appear.
And the Wiki link posted earlier shows commercial use in 1926 and 1929.
That’s a good quarter of the way through the century. Doesn’t introducing a service in the 1920s, with the clear implication that it took more years to grow to be the norm, qualify for “well into”? Sure meets my definition of the term so that’s how and why I used it.
Mileage likely varies on that, so I provided more explicit dates.