As incredible as it might initially sound, the first device approximating a fax machine was in fact invented more than a decade before the telephone. The pantelegraph was invented by an Italian named Giovanni Caselli in the mid 1860s. The device was capable of scanning a page marked with a special solution of potassium ferricyanide that interrupted the transmission of an electrical signal sent via telegraph wire. A stylus attached to a remote device would reproduce the image scanned by the first pantelegraph and dutifully recreate the words or small graphics on a second piece of paper.
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The pantelegraph could only copy an area of approximately four by six inches, and transmission of an image or a bit of text took almost two minutes to complete. Still, the device saw practical applications in use verifying signatures for banking and legal purposes, and it certainly amazed and impressed its share of people the world over.
Eventually, this forerunner of the modern fax machine was superseded by ever better technology, just as the fax machine itself nears obsolescence in the 21st century. Viable uses for the fax machine still remain, however, and the devices still have many devoted users in the commercial, public, military, and private sectors.
The fax machines of today can trace their origins to the 1880s. A scanning phototelegraph invented by British physicist Shelford Tidwell could scan any two dimensional object, transmitting documents, maps, charts, and even photographs via telephone wire. The subsequent decades saw refinements to the technology, including the addition of wireless image transmission capabilities.
In the 1960s, the Xerox Corporation released what may accurately be considered the first modern fax machines. These devices, the LDX (or Long Distance Xerography machine) in 1964 and the *Magnafax Telecopier in 1966, used digital technology to scan and transmit entire pages of data in a few minutes.
Soon page-long faxes (short for facsimile, from the Latin for 'make alike,' for your reference) were being sent in less than a minute and using ever smaller devices. The phone and fax machine combination was seen in offices around the globe throughout the 1980s and 90s, with email and faster online communication finally beginning to supplant the fax at the end of the latter decade.
While faxing is less common today than it was in years gone by, many transactions are still conducted using hard copies of documents, and thus the fax machine still has a role to play in many aspects of life.