(sorry, the original is no longer there) that the first patent was in 1843!
Now from what I understand, the ability to send photos by telegraph would require that the photos be basically scanned, since they would need to be converted to digital form. Was this ability really available back then? If so, why have scanners become popularly available only in the past few years (PCs were out for a while before that, and I don’t remember anyone having a scanner in the 80s)?
Ever see my favorite TV show ever, the Secret Life of Machines? They covered this in the episode about fax machines.
The apparatus consisted of two identical, big-ass pendula connected by a “telegraph” wire. The original image consisted of a metal plate covered by an insulating “stencil” image (or some arrangement like that).
The “reading” pendulum would “scan” the image – back and forth – with a metal stylus that would send a current to the other “writing” pendulum when it touched the metal areas of the plate.
The “writing” pendulum had a stylus too. This one scanned across a chemical-soaked sheet of paper in synch with the “reading” pendulum. When current would flow through the “writing” stylus the paper would blacken.
The result was a very primative, but workable, fax machine.
One of these babies exists in a museum (in France or Germany, IIRC) and when they demonstrated it on the show, it worked amazingly well, though not perfectly.
There were scanners in the 80s–they were just expensive, and low-res, and quirky as hell.
Bear in mind that discovering the basic principle behind a thing is a different matter than doing that thing well or doing it cheaply. The ancient Romans understood the principle of steam power, for example, but that doesn’t mean they could have whipped up a steam locomotive.
In the case of early facsimile machines, they were expensive and quirky and hence mainly used in very specialized areas, like sending photographs to newspapers. It wasn’t until decades of tinkiering made the machines cheap and easy-to-use that we got the modern phenomenon of the fax machine.
(A phenomenon that has probably passed its peak – sending a document via fax seems positively inefficient compared to sending it via e-mail.)
According to this site http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/story051.htm
“For many years, facsimile machines remained cumbersome, expensive and difficult to operate, but in 1966 Xerox introduced the Magnafax Telecopier, a smaller, 46-pound (17 kg) facsimile machine that was easier to use and could be connected to any telephone line. Using this machine, a letter-sized document took about six minutes to transmit. The process was slow, but it represented a major technological step.”
I knew a fellow who, in 1968, was the designated Magnafax Telecopier operator for IBM’s Government, Education, and Medical Region Headquarters in Washington, DC. When someone wanted him to send a fax, he would strap the document to drum (something like a mimeograph machine) and call the recipient. When the recipient had strapped a blank sheet of paper on the drum in her machine, they would both put their telephones in cradles and push buttons and the drums would start to rotate (something like a mimeograph machine) and, voila, after about 6 minutes, with luck, the recipient had the equivalent of a poor quality modern day fax. You can see one of this marvels in action in the movie, Bullitt.
Early fax machines were not “digital”. They had no concept of buffering. They transmitted a voltage (or converted that voltage to a frequency) related to the “grayness” of a point on the image being scanned and transmitted it in real time to a printer that was printing in mechanical sync with the far end scanner.
There was no external “drum” on the machine seen in Bullitt (a Xerox Telecopier 200 with a roll adapter). Rather there was a curved tray that the original or the output carbon set went into. The output image was formed by a stylus that made an image through carbon paper onto regular paper. The later (cost reduced) Xerox 400 had a small diameter drum. It formed an image by burning through a white (zinc oxide?) coating to expose a black layer underneath.
I remember that show, one of my favorites too. IIRC, they mentioned that someone had developed a method for transmitting a (crude) image using semaphore flags before that.
Once the technology existed to create halftone images for newspapers, the same basic technique could be used for facsimile transmission. It just took modern electronics to streamline the process.
The Fax and the Secret Life of Machines - I remember last time the SLOM series came up (I think in a thread about theme music), I ended up watching the entire series (which was pretty good - I think there was 3 series, 2 home, 1 office?).
I watching remember the Fax episode (including the two guys walking across grid patterns in a open field raising the semophore flags to transmit an “A” I think), and at the end as I watched the host fuzting with some long rolls of thermal paper I thought “OK he’ll move on to modern faxes to finish the show with”…took me a bit to remember the series was from the late '80s/early '90s, and there was a reason that “Plain Paper Fax” was becoming a selling point around then.