THE LONG AND STRANGE HISTORY OF THE FAX MACHINE

One of the greatest inventions in history, aside from sliced bread, was the telefacsimile, or fax machine. For bringing this to my attention, I thank my friend and fellow geek, Chicago lawyer, Ben Cohen, who actually gave a presentation on this subject to the Bar Association. Shortly thereafter, all those lawyers were tippling in the other bar.

Most people assume the facsimile machine is a relatively new invention from the
1980's, but in fact it was invented in England by Alexander Bain in 1843. That was more than 30 years prior to the invention of the telephone by Elisha Gray, uh, excuse me, by Alexander Graham Bell (see KENSUSKINREPORT Sept. 9, 2008). Actually Gray, who founded the Western Electric Company, and died in 1901, did obtain a patent for a facsimile transmission system in the 1800's.

Bain was a Scottish clockmaker who used clock mechanisms to transfer an image from one sheet of paper to another. His invention consisted of two pens connected to two pendulums, which were joined to a wire which was able to reproduce writing on an electrically conductive surface. It was called the "automatic electrochemical recording telegraph". The name alone would scare away most potential investors.

In 1862, the Italian physicist, Giovanni Caselli invented the Panetelegraph, using Bain's invention with a synchronizing apparatus. It was the first telefax machine to be used commercially. Caselli introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris, Lyon and Marseilles which was used by the French Post & Telegraph agency through the 1860's. Remember, the telephone was still 10 years in the future.

In 1902, the German inventor, Arthur Korn created telephotography to transmit still photographs over electrical wires. He transmitted a photo from Munich to Berlin in 1907. He achieved fame by transmitting a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908.

In 1925, the French inventor Edouard Belin improved further on this system with the "Belinograph" which placed an image on a cylinder and scanned it with a powerful light beam with a photoelectric cell to convert light into transmittable electrical impulses. All subsequent and modern fax machines use this Belinograph process.

Another amazing device from that era was the transoceanic radio facsimile, invented by RCA designer Richard H. Ranger in 1924. The lone Ranger transmitted a photograph of President Coolidge (unsmiling, of course) from New York to London that year. Radio fax is still used today for transmitting weather charts and information. The same year Herbert Ives of AT&T transmitted the first color facsimile.

In 1934, the Associated Press began transmitting "wire photos" and newspapers began running instant photos transmitted from afar.

A competing technology was the Hellschreiber, invented in 1929 by German electrical engineer Rudolf Hell. It never caught on in the U.S. Maybe the name had something to do with that. Hell's device was used by the German military in World War II where, of course, it raised you know what. Seriously, in Germany, Hell was a well known businessman and inventor who also pioneered television technology. He helped operate an early television station in Munich in 1925. When Hell died in 2002 at age 100, the Mayor of Kiel, Germany, described Hell as "the Edison of the graphic industry". His company became part of the German manufacturing giant Siemens.

Aside from news organizations and government, fax machines were not used much in the business world because they were cumbersome, expensive and difficult to operate. In 1966, Xerox introduced the Magnafax Telecopier, a smaller, 46 pound facsimile machine which could be connected to any telephone line. Although it took 6 minutes to transmit a single letter sized document, it was a start, and the businesses that used it were crazy about it because they didn't know better. You could fly a 50 page document from New York to Los Angeles faster than you could fax it. By 1973, there were 30,000 fax machines in the U.S.

Leave it to old fashioned Japanese ingenuity, however. In the late 1970's, the Japanese companies created a new generation of faster, smaller and more efficient fax machines, and within a few years, this revolution reached virtually every office in America and worldwide. Revolution it was. In 1983, the number of fax machines in the U.S. had jumped to 300,000 and then exploded to 4 million by 1989.

As you can see from this brief history, there's not much new under the sun. The bottom line is that the telefax kept a low profile for much of its history until innovators could create a smaller, cheaper, faster model which the public would buy.

KENNETH SUSKIN

ALEXANDER GRAHAM WHO?--ELISHA GRAY AND THE INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE

February 14, 1876, Valentine's Day. It was an eventful day at the U.S. Patent Office. As the story goes, Alexander Graham Bell showed up at the patent office with his application for the telephone while Elisha Gray's lawyer got stuck in rush hour traffic--or maybe stopped for a beer or two on the way over. In any case, his patent application came in an hour later. So now we have Bell Telephone rather than Gray Telephone, which would sound like a pretty boring name anyway.

But, as usual, there are conflicting stories behine all this. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually got to the bottom of it and decided in favor of Mr. Bell. That patent became the most valuable patent in history. While Bell became one of the most famous people in history, Gray remained virtually unknown.

Despite his anonymity, Gray did invent some other useful things at his laboratory in Highland Park, IL. a suburb of Chicago. For example he invented the "telautograph" which would transmit handwriting through telegraph systems. In effect, it was an early fax machine which was used by banks for signing documents at a distance. The Telautograph Corp. continued in operation for many years until it was absorbed by Xerox Corp. in the 1990's.

Mr. Gray's invention was massacred on that fateful Valentine's Day because, according to Gray, his patent caveat was delivered to the patent office early in the morning when it opened, but it found its way to the borrom of the in-basket until that afternoon. Meanwhile Bell's application was filed around noon, by Bell's lawyer who requested that the filing fee be entered and taken to the examiner immediately and that he be given a receipt. Gray's filing fee was not recorded until later that afternoon, and his application did not reach the examiner until the next morning. Bell wasn't even in town that day, but, in effect, his lawyer won the race to the courthouse.

For the record, the Supreme Court's decision turned partly on the subtle difference between a caveat and a patent application. A caveat, which is not used anymore, was a confidential, formal declaration made by an inventor stating his intention to file a patent on an idea yet to be perfected. The purpose was to protect an idea from being usurped by fellow inventors. Gray would have had to file his actual patent application within 3 months after the caveat. Bell, of course, filed his application and was awarded the patent.

Historians still debate whether Bell stole key aspects of the invention from Gray, as there was some correspondence between the two inventors. Bell kept an extensive paper trail of several drafts of his patent application. When the dust had settled, it appears that Bell had smarter lawyers than Gray did.

According to Burton H. Baker in his 2000 book The Gray Matter, The Forgotten Story of the Telephone, the patent office determined, "while Gray was undoubtedly the first to conceive of and disclose the invention as in his caveat of February 14, 1876, his failure to take any action amounting to completion until others had demonstrated the utility of the invention deprives him of the right to have it considered."

Despite his relative obscurity, Gray was a fairly successful businessman and professor. His company, Gray & Barton Co. of Cleveland, OH. supplied telegraph equipment to Western Union Telegraph Co. In 1872, his firm sold 33% of the company to Western Union and changed the name of his company to Western Electric Manufacturing Co. of Chicago, which eventually became a major subsidiary of AT&T. Although several inventions came out of Gray's Highland Park, IL. laboratory, and I am very familiar with that town, I know of no memorial or any other indication that history was almost made there.

The controversy made its way into that great interpreter of American popular culture, The Simpsons, in a 2005 episode. THe Springfield Stamp Museum had an exhibit of oversized, interactive stamps showing Elisha Gray on a 1-cent stamp, and Alexander Graham Bell on a 10-cent stamp. When Gray accuses Bell of stealing the idea of the telephone from him, Bell holds up a medallion around his neck and says, "Read the patent number, bitch!"

KENNETH SUSKIN