Now here’s another surprise: after the telephone, the fax is the most important modern office innovation to be created in the 19th century. Alexander Bain, a hard-drinking Scot, patented the first fax process in 1843. As a schoolboy, Bain scored poorly and obsessed on clocks. After he moved to London, he developed the so-called master-slave mechanism, which, among other things, synchronized systems of school clocks. Bain’s synchronization skills were indispensable for early fax technology. It required the transmitter of an image to send, via precisely timed telegraphy, successive lines of the image to a receiver, which were then reassembled at the exact same speed with the help of electromagnetic pendulums.
Nearly a century later, the idea for “electrophotography” came to Chester Carlson, a poor Caltech grad working in a New York City patent office. It was 1934, and Carlson found himself in constant need of duplicate copies of patent specifications. Loath to hand-copy everything, he set about saving himself time. Since he knew that large companies were already exploring photographic and chemical copy processes, he turned his apartment into an electrostatics laboratory. It took Carlson four years to hit pay dirt. His first photocopied message: “10-22-38 ASTORIA.” Carlson sold his idea to a New York firm that wanted an exotic name for its new process. A consultant, William Robert Jones, an Ohio State University classics professor, chose the Greek word for “dry writing”: xerography. A decade later, the company renamed itself Xerox. Its breakthrough 914, a 650-pound monster that cost $29,500, debuted in 1960. By the 1970s Xerox had permeated corporate America.
As the copier bloomed, the much older fax finally began taking root. The first commercial fax machine, then called long-distance xerography, went into service in 1964. The fax boom began in 1980, when the price dropped below $2,000 and a digital standard made it possible to network all faxes worldwide. Between 1985 and 1990, fax machines proliferated– from 500,000 to 5 million. Federal Express tried to capitalize on the technology with ZAP Mail, a heavily promoted, high-speed fax service. It was a disaster, costing the company $300 million, says Jonathan Coopersmith, a tech history professor at Texas A&M. “But in the process,” he says, “it popularized the fax machine.”
Both pieces of equipment have played small roles in historical dramas. In 1962 the CIA used a Xerox repairman to mount an 8-mm movie camera inside the Xerox 914 at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. For its part, the fax has developed into a propaganda tool for democratic movements. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration, Chinese students in the United States faxed pro-democracy manifestoes to random Chinese fax numbers. Mikhail Gorbachev beat back a coup attempt in 1991 with the help of Russian citizens who faxed updates to the Voice of America that in turn were read back over the airwaves to millions of Russians.
Though they seem indispensable to modern life, the fax and photocopier may have begun their inevitable decline. Some experts predict that e-mail and the Web will make the fax and photocopier redundant. But not for another two decades, predicts Columbia University’s Michael van Biema. “We have this view of America being cutting edge,” he says. “But an awfully large number of our documents still take four days to get from A to B by way of the U.S. mail.”
