History
Is the fax machine older than the telephone?
The short answer
Yes, by 33 years. Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented the first fax device — an Electric Printing Telegraph — on 27 May 1843. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876. We could send a picture before we could send a voice.
Bain's machine used synchronised pendulums to scan an image line by line at one end and reproduce it at the other. The principle is the same one every fax machine and flatbed scanner has used since: take a two-dimensional thing, turn it into a sequence, send the sequence, rebuild the thing.
The date is the shock. 1843 is before the American Civil War. The electric telegraph itself was only about a decade old, and Bain was already working out how to send a drawing down it.
It took over a century for the technology to become ordinary, and then about twenty years for it to become a punchline. The device everyone treats as a fossil of the 1980s was invented before the telephone, the light bulb and the telephone's inventor.
Sources
- When Was the Fax Machine Invented?HowStuffWorks
- Alexander Bain (inventor)Wikipedia