Fax timeline

Key milestones

1. 1843

   Two pendulums and a patent

   Alexander Bain is granted a British patent for an electric clockwork mechanism able to copy raised type at a distance. One stylus sweeps the original, another reproduces the pattern on chemically treated paper at the other end: line-by-line scanning is born.

2. 1848

   The rotating cylinder

   English physicist Frederick Bakewell patents an "image telegraph" that wraps the document around a spinning cylinder traced by a metal point. Shown at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, this rotating-drum principle would equip generations of machines.

3. 1865

   Paris to Lyon by pantelegraph

   Italian priest Giovanni Caselli sees his pantelegraph taken up by the French telegraph administration. The Paris–Lyon line opens to the public, and bankers and merchants use it to send handwriting and signatures. The service never pays its way and fades out around 1870.

4. 1913

   The portable Belinograph

   Frenchman Édouard Belin unveils a transportable version of his Belinograph that works over a telephone line. Newspapers seize on it to send news photos; in France, a "bélino" long meant a picture received by wire.

5. 1924

   Press photos take to the line

   AT&T sends pictures of the Republican convention in Cleveland to New York over telephone lines. Late that year, RCA transmits a photograph from London to New York by radio. Picture transmission becomes a routine service for newsrooms.

6. 1948

   Fax moves into client offices

   Western Union launches Desk-Fax, a small unit installed at business customers' premises to exchange telegrams as images with the telegraph office. Fax becomes an everyday working tool rather than equipment reserved for the press.

7. 1964

   Long-distance xerography

   Xerox unveils LDX (Long Distance Xerography), which pairs scanning with xerographic printing to send documents between a company's sites over dedicated high-capacity links. Still expensive, it foreshadows the office fax.

8. 1966

   The Telecopier on an ordinary line

   Together with Magnavox, Xerox brings out the Magnafax Telecopier: around 20 kilograms, a telephone handset resting in an acoustic coupler, six minutes per page. For the first time, an office worker can fax from any telephone extension.

9. 1968

   A first shared language

   The CCITT, forerunner of the ITU-T, adopts the Group 1 standard (T.2): still six minutes a page, but machines from different makers can finally talk to each other. That same year, the Carterfone decision opens the US network to third-party equipment. In 1976, Group 2 (T.3) would cut the page to three minutes.

10. 1980

    Group 3: a page in under a minute

    Two texts, T.4 to digitise pages and T.30 to steer the call, take fax digital: white areas compressed, speed negotiated automatically, each page confirmed. Japan, whose script was ill-suited to telex, quickly makes it standard office kit.

11. 1998

    Fax learns IP

    T.38 receives ITU-T approval. Gateways can now convert a fax machine's signal into data packets and rebuild it at the destination, so fax travels over voice-over-IP networks without the devices themselves having to change.

12. 2020s

    The end of copper

    European operators are shutting down the switched telephone network, area by area. Fax machines move behind routers or adapters, while sending from a browser, with no device and no subscription, becomes the most direct way to dispatch the occasional fax.

Fax history: your questions answered

Who actually invented fax?

The principle goes back to Scotsman Alexander Bain, who patented it in 1843. Frederick Bakewell refined it, and Giovanni Caselli ran it commercially from 1865. The office fax as we know it, though, is the result of collective standardisation work within the CCITT, crowned by Group 3 in 1980.

Did fax truly come before the telephone?

Yes. Bain filed his patent in 1843, Alexander Graham Bell his in 1876. It would take until the 1920s for the telephone line to become the usual medium for sending pictures.

Which standards does a fax use in 2026?

Still the Group 3 set: T.4 to code the image and T.30 to run the call, often supplemented by ECM and T.6 MMR compression. When part of the route crosses an IP network, T.38 wraps that dialogue in packets.

Does faxing have a future?

The physical machine is in retreat as the copper network shuts down. Fax as a way of transmitting documents remains in demand wherever an organisation insists on proof of delivery, and these days it runs perfectly well without a machine. The medium changes; the use endures.