When Was the Fax Machine Invented? 1843, Before the Phone

“Two machines, one of which may be considered at London, and the other at Portsmouth.” That is how Sheet 6, the sixth of seven sheets of drawings in Alexander Bain’s British patent of 27 May 1843, introduces a way to copy a page of type from one city to another by electricity.

The patent’s title promises “Certain Improvements in Producing and Regulating Electric Currents, and Improvements in Electric Time-pieces, and in Electric Printing and Signal Telegraphs.” The copier comes seventh of nine improvements claimed for clocks and telegraphs, after a battery of “positive and negative substances placed in the earth”: “The arrangement for taking copies of surfaces at distant places by means of electricity, as shewn in Sheet 6.”

When was the fax machine invented?

The fax machine was invented in 1843, when the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented a way to copy a page of type over electric wires. Copying telegraphs were tested on real lines by 1851, a commercial service linked Paris and Lyon in 1865, 11 years before the telephone was patented, and fax machines filled offices in the 1980s.

Two pendulums copied a page of type in dots

Bain trained as a clockmaker in Wick and moved to London in 1837, according to a 2012 study by the physicist Ivan Ruddock, who notes that the copier “was part of Bain’s 1843 patent.” Bain signed the specification on 27 November 1843, and an 1876 New York collection of telegraph patents reprints it.

At the sending end, the message was set in printer’s type, the metal sorts whose body size gave the em dash its name. The type pressed against a frame packed with short insulated wires, each cut “into lengths of about an inch.” A pendulum “continually kept in motion by powerful clocks” swept a steel spring across the other ends, so current flowed only through wires touching type.

At the receiving end, a matching pendulum swept a matching frame pressed against “two thicknesses of damp paper previously saturated with a solution composed of equal parts of prusiate of potash and nitrate of soda.” Current crossing the paper marked it, “which will produce a copy of the printing surface of the types in a series of small dots.” At the end of each swing, clockwork let both frames drop a step.

The pendulums kept time by “The method of making pendulums regulate each other,” a separate item in the same claim. Bain added that “a copy of any other surface composed of conducting and non-conducting materials, can be taken by these means.”

The Electric Printing Telegraph was a different machine in the same patent

Wikipedia’s article on fax says Bain received patent 9745 for his “Electric Printing Telegraph,” and a FaxBurner blog post says “He called it the Electric Printing Telegraph,” as if the name belonged to the copier. The phrase in the patent’s title points elsewhere: Sheet 5 “shews certain of my improvements in electric printing telegraphs,” a printer driven by a type wheel.

In April 1844 the Mechanics’ Magazine headlined a working version “Mr. Bain’s Electric Printing Telegraph.” It was shown at Nine Elms station in London and sent signals to Wimbledon, “a distance of six miles,” where “every message (indicated by numbers) was transmitted and returned correctly.”

The 1843 specification reports no trial of the copier, and accounts of what came next differ. Ruddock judges that “The idea was probably not pursued by Bain,” while Wikipedia’s Bain biography, citing no source for those dates, has him working on an experimental fax machine from 1843 to 1846.

Either way, he returned to it. He took out a US patent for an “Improvement in copying surfaces by electricity,” dated 5 December 1848, and the official catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 listed his “Patent electro-chemical copying telegraph, said to be capable of copying any figure, such as profiles, autographs, stenography, etc.”

Bakewell swapped the pendulums for cylinders

Frederick Collier Bakewell’s patent No. 12,352, dated 2 December 1848, describes a “copying telegraph” whose cylinders turned in step while an iron point, driven by a screw, traced a spiral over each. The message was written in varnish on tin foil, so it could be handwriting.

His 1851 catalogue entry offered “facsimiles of the handwriting of correspondents, so that their signatures may be identified,” the copy “appearing of a pale colour on a ground of closely-drawn blue lines.” It was “not yet in operation,” the entry admitted, though tested between stations of the Electric Telegraph Company.

From 1848 to 1850, Jonathan Coopersmith writes in Faxed (2015), Bain and Bakewell traded public letters “accusing each other of theft of intellectual property, dishonesty, incompetence, and betrayals of trust.”

Paris and Lyon traded faxes 11 years before the telephone patent

The machine that reached paying customers was the pantelegraph, or “all-telegraph” in Coopersmith’s gloss, of the Florence-based priest and physicist Giovanni Caselli. In the engineer Robert Sabine’s 1869 history of the telegraph, “a long and heavy pendulum” rocks two styluses, one tracing a message written in insulating ink on metallic paper, the other marking chemically treated paper with lines of “Prussian blue.”

“In 1865 two of these instruments were set up at work between Paris and Lyons,” Sabine wrote. Coopersmith calls it “the world’s first fax service” and records that in 1866, 4,853 of 4,860 Caselli transmissions between Lyon and Paris “involved finance or business.” It was slow: by Sabine’s arithmetic, a strip 111 by 27 millimetres holding about 25 written words took 1 minute 48 seconds.

Alexander Graham Bell’s US patent 174,465 for the telephone, titled “Improvement in Telegraphy,” was granted on 7 March 1876, nearly 33 years after Bain’s.

“Copying telegraphs have never reached a considerable status as an employable system,” Robert Sabine wrote in 1869, partly because “occasions requiring the production of fac-similes present themselves very rarely.”

The office fax took another century

In 1966 Xerox announced the Magnafax Telecopier: with a phone handset laid in its coupler, a letter-size page could be “transmitted in six minutes to any spot in the nation where there is an ordinary telephone and a counterpart Telecopier,” Computers and Automation reported that July. In Coopersmith’s account, the 46-pound machine was delivered in July 1966 and “marked the start of successful mass production of fax machines.”

The boom waited for the early 1980s. Coopersmith traces it to “the combination of increasing deregulation, true compatibility, quickly dropping costs, greater competition” from that point, and Ruddock writes that fax machines then “became part of office and domestic furniture.” As with the first video game, which machine counts as the first fax depends on what it had to copy:

Date	Milestone	What it copied
27 May 1843	Bain’s British patent	Printer’s type, as dots
2 Dec. 1848	Bakewell’s British patent	Handwriting in varnish on tin foil
1865	Caselli’s Paris-Lyon service	Writing in insulating ink
July 1966	Xerox Magnafax Telecopier delivered	A letter-size page by telephone, in six minutes

Paris was sending handwriting to Lyon by wire 11 years before Bell patented the telephone, and the idea began as the seventh of nine improvements in a patent that opens with batteries buried in the earth. Strictly FYI.