Two centuries of fax, in twelve milestones

Twelve dates that made fax

1. 1843

   The remote copy patented

   Alexander Bain obtains UK protection for an electric clockwork device that reproduces raised characters remotely: one stylus reads the original while a second traces the same shapes onto paper treated with chemicals. Line-by-line scanning has just come into existence.

2. 1848

   Bakewell's cylinder

   In 1851, London's Great Exhibition showed an “image telegraph” invented by the Briton Frederick Bakewell. The device scanned a document wrapped around a rotating drum with a metal stylus, and successive generations of machines would keep using that drum.

3. 1865

   The pantelegraph enters service

   The Italian Giovanni Caselli sees the French telegraph administration adopt his pantelegraph. On the Paris–Lyon line, open to the public, bankers and merchants pass accounts and signatures. Barely profitable, the service fades out around 1870.

4. 1913

   Belin makes his machine portable

   The Frenchman Édouard Belin presents a transportable bélinographe, connected to the telephone network. Newspapers seize it to dispatch their news photos; in France, “bélino” would long remain the name for an image that arrived by wire.

5. 1924

   News pictures on the line

   The Republican convention in Cleveland supplies the plates: AT&T carries them by telephone line to New York; RCA, late in the year, sends a photograph by radio from London to New York. Newsrooms now run a regular picture service.

6. 1948

   Western Union puts fax in its customers' offices

   The Western Union Desk-Fax, a compact machine, reaches business premises, where firms swap telegrams in image form with the telegraph office. Fax turns into an everyday working gesture, no longer confined to the press.

7. 1964

   Xerox experiments with remote xerography

   Xerox's LDX (Long Distance Xerography) adds xerographic printing to digitisation: documents circulate between the sites of a single company, over high-speed leased lines. Costly, it foreshadows the office fax.

8. 1966

   The Magnafax accepts ordinary lines

   Xerox, with Magnavox, puts the Magnafax Telecopier on sale: the machine weighs around twenty kilos; you rest a handset on an acoustic coupler, and each page takes six minutes. For the first time, faxing requires nothing more than an ordinary telephone set.

9. 1968

   Group 1 unifies the machines

   The CCITT — later known as the ITU-T — endorsed the Group 1 standard (T.2), allowing machines from competing manufacturers to finally interoperate, even though a page still required six minutes. In the same year, the Carterfone ruling permitted third-party devices on the American network. Group 2 (T.3) would cut that to three minutes per page in 1976.

10. 1980

    Group 3: digital and fast

    T.4 codes the pages, T.30 runs the call: fax enters the digital era. Blank areas compress, the speed adjusts automatically, each page gets its acknowledgement. Japan, whose writing resisted the telex, immediately makes it an office standard.

11. 1998

    T.38 brings fax onto IP

    The ITU-T standard behind T.38 makes gateways split the fax transmission into packets and reconstruct it at the far end. Today the signal moves through IP telephony networks, but the hardware itself remains unchanged.

12. 2020s

    Copper gives up the ghost

    European operators dismantle the switched network, region after region. Fax machines move behind broadband boxes and adapters, and sending from a plain browser — no machine, no subscription — establishes itself as the most direct route for faxing from time to time.

Fax, its dates and its standards: your questions

Who do we owe the fax to?

The idea belongs to the Scot Alexander Bain, patented as early as 1843; Frederick Bakewell improved it and, from 1865, Giovanni Caselli exploited it commercially. The office fax, for its part, came out of collective standardisation work at the CCITT, completed by Group 3 in 1980.

Does fax predate the telephone?

Yes. Bain held his patent from 1843; Alexander Graham Bell would wait until 1876. The telephone line only became the ordinary medium for images in the 1920s.

What standards does a fax rely on in 2026?

Still Group 3: T.4 takes care of the image, T.30 manages the call, frequently enriched with ECM and the MMR compression from T.6. If the path runs over IP, T.38 wraps the conversation in packets.

Does fax have a future?

As copper lines disappear, the transmission is still called upon by organizations that want proof of delivery, though it now works without hardware. The medium changes, the use remains.