Joey Watson and Ian Coombe* say last century’s humble facsimile might have passed its glory days, but it is far from extinct.
If you read this article and wanted to share it with a friend, it would be surprising if you decided to fax it.
That’s because the humble facsimile of the last century is as good as extinct … right?
Maybe not.
According to historian Dr Jonathan Coopersmith, while faxing might have passed its glory days, it is far from dead.
“Overall as email and other digital communications improve [fax use] has faded, but in some countries fax usage seems to be holding steady,” he says.
“It seems counterintuitive because we have email, we have the worldwide web, but people are still using the fax machine and businesses are still finding it useful.”
So why is it so persistent?
The answer might be found in the international history of the fax, which helped propel human technology into the information age.
Inventing the fax
By the mid-18th century Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, had already patented a very rudimentary version of the fax machine.
Bain’s prototype was the automatic chemical telegraph.
It relied on special ink scripted onto a metallic surface which could be transmitted as the electrical impression of a message.
The science was exciting, but few people had communication needs that couldn’t be met by the burgeoning telephone and its older sibling, the telegraph.
“The success of the fax demanded a practical system of equipment, wires, and code as well as markets that could generate profits that did not yet exist,” Dr Coopersmith says.
It would take almost a century, and the invention of the camera, for an industry to spot the possibilities of transmitting identical photographs over large distances.
From the 1930s, newspaper readers were mystified by the photographs of distant disasters that would magically appear the next day in their rag of choice.
“Discounting smoke signals, pigeon carriers, and the telegraph, faxing enabled for the first time the transmission of messages faster than the physical messenger over long distances,” Dr Coopersmith says.
“Newspapers were willing to pay premium prices for faxed or wire-photoed photographs because they enabled papers to print images with the latest news — and that sold newspapers.”
The military also began to use faxes to send maps and charts between aircraft.
But the power of the facsimile remained foreign to the average punter.
Making it in Japan
While the typed telegraph, the fax’s rival, forged ahead in the West, it was another story in Japan, where messages would be written using some of the tens of thousands of kanji characters.
Japanese businesses, tired of operating complex kanji typewriters, began looking at the fax’s potential to reliably send handwritten messages over great distances.
“The Japanese led the way as a market, standards setter, and manufacturer,” Dr Coopersmith says.
“By the 1980s, Japan was the leading market for fax machines.”
As Japan developed the technology, Dr Coopersmith says, the creation of standards proved essential to the fax’s increased use in the West.
“Up until 1980, one of the big problems of fax machines is that companies were creating incompatible machines [that couldn’t communicate with each other],” he says.
“In 1980 the International Telecommunications Union passed a Japanese-based standard called G3 that made it possible for competing firms to standardise their communication protocols.”
As prices dropped, faxing settled in as a key technology of the late twentieth century, and people took advantage of their ability to transmit anything they could put on paper.
But the internet revolution of the new millennium rocked the fax.
In some ways, Dr Coopersmith believes that the fax contributed to its own demise by inculcating its users with the expectations of immediately accessible images.
“Faxing encouraged people to expect instant electronic communications and to be able to access and receive information electronically and easily,” he says.
“A lot of people especially by the late 1990s were computer literate and had computers that were hooked up to networks in their offices and homes.”
“And once you had easy to use emails or email systems it was easier to email than it was to fax.”
“This was a gradual change starting in the early 1990s.”
You can’t escape the fax
Since then, the fax has all but died out — or so you may think.
A worldwide survey in 2017 found that of 200 large firms — defined as companies with more than 500 employees — 82 per cent had seen workers send at least the same number of faxes as in 2016.
Behind this, says Dr Coopersmith, are “governments, doctors, pharmacists, real estate agents and anybody who has customers that demand that they communicate by fax machine”.
The biggest lifeline for the fax, he says, has been the behemothic US health system where digital patient-information systems have struggled to meet the security standards of the fax.
“If you’re sending using an old-fashioned fax machine over a telephone line the only way it can be intercepted is to have a dedicated fax intercept device,” Dr Coopersmith says.
Beyond doctors’ surgeries, the need to transfer signed documents has also offered the fax a modern use.
While emailed signatures are now legal in many countries, some businesses are still catching up.
“There’s still a lot of reluctance to accept that email signature as valid [and] a lot of people [are] worried about anything sent over email,” Dr Coopersmith says.
This creates a cycle, he says, as every company that prefers faxes inherently encourages all its suppliers to keep faxing too, to avoid messing up existing processes.
“Small businesses who find that faxing meets all their needs have little reason to spend the money and effort to try a new technology for document exchange.”
And whatever the future holds for the humble fax machine, its legacy will undoubtedly be carried into the digital age.
“We now have assumptions of rapid, inexpensive, and accurate communications of documents and images by anyone worldwide,” Dr Coopersmith says.
“It’s the democratisation of information.”
* Joey Watson is an ABC Radio producer and features writer. He tweets at @joeyhwatson. Ian Coombe is anABC Radio producer.
This article first appeared at www.abc.net.au.
