Two centuries of fax, in twelve milestones
From Bain's electric clock to the fax sent from a browser: a hundred and eighty years of image transmission.
Fax predates the telephone by more than thirty years. In 1843, Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, patents a mechanism that reproduces a design at a distance by scanning a sheet line by line, paced by two synchronised pendulums. Later machines only ever varied the idea; only the medium changed: telegraph wire, then telephone line, then IP networks. The real turning point arrived in 1980: the CCITT brought out the Group 3 specifications (T.4 and T.30) — a minute a page became the rule — and those documents still govern today's faxes.
Twelve dates that made fax
1843
The remote copy patented
Alexander Bain secures UK protection for an electric clockwork mechanism that reproduces raised characters at a distance: one stylus scans the original, a second retraces the pattern on chemically treated paper. Line-by-line scanning has just been born.
1848
Bakewell's cylinder
The Briton Frederick Bakewell patents an “image telegraph”: the document wraps around a rotating cylinder that a metal point scans. London's Great Exhibition displays it in 1851; the drum would turn in generations of machines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1968
Group 1 unifies the machines
The CCITT — later the ITU-T — gives its blessing to the Group 1 standard (T.2): a page still takes six minutes, yet machines built by rival brands finally understand each other. The same year, the Carterfone decision allows third-party equipment on the American network. Three minutes a page: that is what Group 2 (T.3) would achieve in 1976.
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.
1998
T.38 brings fax onto IP
The ITU-T adopts T.38: gateways translate the fax machine's signal into data packets, then rebuild it at the destination. Fax now travels over voice over IP, with no change to the machines.
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.
1980: the standard that refuses to die
Group 3 won out for a down-to-earth reason: it worked over the telephone line already installed in every office. Group 4, standardised in 1984 (T.6), offered more speed and finer detail, but demanded an ISDN link all the way. Businesses chose the tool that spoke to their correspondents, not the most advanced technology.
Every G3 machine sold made the next one useful; the worldwide installed base, in the 1990s, ran into the tens of millions of devices. Rather than replace that foundation, the standard-setters extended it: MMR to compress, V.34 to modulate, ECM to correct, and lastly T.38 to transport it across IP networks.
A fax machine from the 1980s still receives a page sent from a smartphone today: at both ends, the T.30 procedure runs identically; only the path between them has been renewed.
Fax in 2026
The machine sitting beside the desk is in its final years: it only works through an analogue socket, which fibre is making disappear. The service, meanwhile, has detached itself from the hardware: a destination number, a file, a delivery receipt — everything leaves from a browser.
That confirmation explains why fax survives in hospitals, law firms, and numerous public services. Across every generation, the tool has taken new forms; the need to know a document arrived has not moved.
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?
- The machine retreats as the copper closes; the transmission, for its part, is still called on by organisations that want proof of delivery, and it now does without hardware. The medium changes, the use remains.
Telephony and networks
This topic
- Copper is dying: fax carries on
- A configuration guide: keeping a fax machine in service when the line comes in over fibre, cable or an IP PBX.
- The equipment you need, the real cost, and why Faxeroo limits itself to sending.
- Not a relic, not a snobbery: a tool that solves one precise problem — establishing that a document arrived.
Keep reading
Pages chosen to help you prepare a send, track it, or keep proof of it.