The history of the fax machine begins in 1843 England with Alexander Bain. He devised an apparatus made up of two pens connected to two pendulums. For more indepth information on the History of the fax machine browse the links available.

Fax Machine
Telefacsimile's or fax machines are an everyday must for many businesses around the world.

The fax machine however, did not become widely used until the late 1980's. In fact, between the years 1983 to 1989, the number fax machines in use went from 300,000 to 4,000,000.

A fax means basically scanning a page to make an electronic representation of its text or graphics, compresses the data to save transmission time, and transmits it to another facsimile machine. The receiving machine decrypts the signal and uses a printer (usually built in) to make a facsimile of the original page.

Several people took part in inventing the machine; they include Alexander Bain, Elisha Gray, Arthur Korn, and Edouard Beeline. It took almost 140 years for the fax machine to become an everyday appliance, but its roots have been around for quite a while.

Brief History Of The Fax Machine
The history of the fax begins in 1843 England with Alexander Bain. He devised an apparatus made up of two pens connected to two pendulums. He joined the two together with a wire, and was able to reproduce writing onto an electrically conducive surface.

Several years later, in 1862, Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli built a machine he called a pantelegraph, which was based on Bain's invention but also included a synchronizing apparatus. It basically had the same effect as Bain?s invention. His pantelegraph was used by the French Post & Telegraph agency between Paris and Marseilles from 1856 to 1870.

Elisha Gray, an American inventor, invented and patented many electrical devices, including a facsimile transmission system. He almost patented the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell beat him to it by only a few hours. Gray organized a company that later became known as the Western Electric Company.

Another man, In 1902, by the name of Arthur Korn, invented telephotography, a means for manually breaking down and transmitting still photographs by means of electrical wires. In 1907, Korn sent the first inter-city fax when he transmitted a photograph from Munich to Berlin. This was perhaps the greatest boost the fax machine had faced so far, and soon many people would try to perfect the machine.

In France, Edouard Beeline constructed the Belinograph. His invention involved placing an image on a cylinder and scanning it with a powerful light beam that had a photoelectric cell, which could convert light, or the absence of light, into transmittable electrical impulses. The Belinograph process used the basic principle upon which all subsequent facsimile transmission machines would be based.

Today's fax machines owe their core design to the Belinograph although many fax machines have changed over the years.