By David Thompson · Published April 2, 2026 · Updated April 3, 2026 · 12 min read
The fax machine was invented in 1843 — 33 years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Most people assume fax is a product of the 1980s office boom, but the underlying technology traces back to a Scottish clockmaker tinkering with electric pendulums in the early Victorian era.
Understanding when the fax machine was invented means following one of technology's longest development arcs: from a laboratory curiosity in 1843, to a commercial wire service in Paris in 1865, to a 46-pound desk appliance from Xerox in 1966, to the ubiquitous office tool of the 1980s — and finally to the cloud-based fax services that keep the protocol alive today.
The Short Answer
Alexander Bain invented the fax machine and received his patent on May 27, 1843. The first commercial fax service ran in France from 1865. The modern telephone-line fax machine arrived with Xerox in 1966, and fax became a universal office standard after the ITU Group 3 standard in 1980.
Alexander Bain and the First Fax Patent (1843)
Alexander Bain (1811–1877) was a Scottish clockmaker with a talent for applying mechanical clockwork to electrical problems. On May 27, 1843, he received British Patent No. 9745, which described what he called an "Electric Printing Telegraph" — the world's first fax machine patent.
Bain's device was ingenious by Victorian standards. It used two synchronized pendulums — one at the transmitter, one at the receiver — connected over a telegraph wire. The transmitting pendulum scanned a flat metal type bed point by point; wherever the stylus touched a raised metal character, it completed an electrical circuit and sent a pulse down the wire. The receiving end used paper soaked in a chemical solution that darkened wherever a current arrived, reproducing the original image line by line.
The core problem was synchronization. Bain's two pendulums were never truly in sync, which produced distorted, blurry reproductions. The system was a laboratory proof of concept — not a commercial product. But the fundamental idea it established — scanning an image point-by-point, transmitting electrical pulses, and reproducing the result on chemically treated paper — would remain the basis of fax technology for the next 180 years.
Fax Predates the Telephone by 33 Years
Alexander Graham Bell received his telephone patent on March 7, 1876. Bain's fax patent came in 1843 — making the core concept of document transmission over wire older than voice transmission by a generation.
Early Improvements: The Path to the First Commercial Fax (1848–1870)
Frederick Bakewell's Rotating Cylinders (1848)
British inventor Frederick Bakewell made the first significant mechanical improvement to Bain's design. He replaced the swinging pendulums with synchronized rotating cylinders — a far more stable scanning mechanism. Bakewell demonstrated his "copying telegraph" at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the world's fair of its day.
The synchronization problem persisted, but Bakewell's cylinder design was the direct predecessor of every subsequent facsimile device. Almost all fax machines — up through the thermal-paper machines of the 1990s — would use a rotating drum as their core scanning mechanism.
Giovanni Caselli's Pantelegraph — The First Commercial Fax Service (1865)
Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli (1815–1891) took Bakewell's cylinder concept and actually made it work. His device, the Pantelegraph, used a precision pendulum clock to synchronize both ends of the transmission — solving the fundamental problem that had plagued Bain and Bakewell.
Caselli's development timeline:
- 1857: Built his first working device in Paris with engineer Paul-Gustave Froment
- 1858: Demonstrated at the French Academy of Sciences
- November 1860: Long-distance trial Paris to Amiens (140 km), transmitting composer Rossini's signature
- February 10, 1862: First "pantelegram" sent from Lyon to Paris
- February 1863: Public commercial service opened on the Paris–Lyon route
On February 1, 1865, the French government formally recognized the Pantelegraph service — marking the world's first commercial facsimile network. The service later expanded to Marseille before closing around 1870.
The Pantelegraph's primary business use was signature verification for banking transactions — customers could authenticate signatures remotely rather than having a courier carry documents between cities. A 111mm × 27mm message with 25 words took about 108 seconds to transmit.
Photography Meets Telegraphy (1880s–1920s)
Shelford Bidwell and the Scanning Phototelegraph (1881)
British physicist Shelford Bidwell created the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original without manual plotting. His innovation: a selenium photocell that measured light intensity as a rotating cylinder carried the original document past a small aperture.
This was the first use of a light-sensitive electrical cell for image scanning — a direct ancestor of the CCD scanners in modern fax machines. Bidwell published his findings in Nature in 1881 under the title "Tele-Photography." His device is preserved at the London Science Museum.
Elisha Gray's Telautograph (1888)
Elisha Gray — better known for his disputed telephone patent with Bell — patented the telautograph on July 31, 1888. It transmitted handwriting by measuring pen movements electrically and reproducing them at the receiving end. Gray publicly exhibited it at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
By the early 20th century, telautographs were installed in banks, hospitals, railroad stations (including Grand Central Terminal and Chicago Union Station), and libraries. Doctors used them to transmit prescription orders accurately between floors of a hospital — an early version of what fax would do for medical records a century later.
Arthur Korn and the First Transmitted News Photograph (1906)
German physicist Arthur Korn combined selenium photocells with a Nernst lamp to produce the Bildtelegraph — the first system that could transmit continuous-tone photographs rather than just line drawings.
On October 17, 1906, Korn transmitted a photograph of Crown Prince Wilhelm over 1,800 kilometers. More practically, in 1907 his technology was used to send a photograph of a bank robber from Stuttgart to London, leading to the thief's arrest — one of the first uses of transmitted imagery in law enforcement.
Édouard Belin and the Bélinographe (1907)
French inventor Édouard Belin developed a refined phototelegraphic system called the Bélinographe in 1907. At each point of the scan, a photocell measured light intensity; at the receiver, a variable-intensity light source exposed photographic paper with the same measurements.
The Bélinographe was used for journalistic photographs from 1914 onward — making it the first fax technology to reach mass adoption, even if that adoption was limited to press agencies rather than the general public. The scanning principle Belin pioneered is still the basis of modern fax scanners.
The Wirephoto Era: Fax Finds Its First Mass Market (1920s–1950s)
The 1920s brought fax into commercial media. Newspapers needed to transmit photographs across cities and oceans faster than physical courier could manage. That need created the first mass-market fax infrastructure.
AT&T, RCA, and Transoceanic Radio Fax (1924–1926)
Two breakthrough demonstrations happened within months of each other in 1924:
- May 19, 1924: AT&T scientists transmitted 15 photographs by telephone from Cleveland to New York City. The same year, AT&T's Herbert E. Ives transmitted the first color facsimile using red, green, and blue color separations.
- November 29, 1924: RCA electrical engineer Richard H. Ranger sent a photograph of President Calvin Coolidge from New York to London by radio — the first transoceanic radio transmission of a photograph.
AT&T's wirephoto service opened commercially in 1925. RCA's radiophoto service followed in 1926. For the first time, newspapers could receive photographs from anywhere in the world within hours — not days.
The Associated Press Wirephoto Service (1935)
The Associated Press launched its Wirephoto network on January 1, 1935, with the inaugural image depicting a small plane crash in New York's Adirondack Mountains. This industrialized the transmission of news photography across America.
During World War II, AP, UPI, and Reuters maintained transoceanic radio facsimile transmitters near combat zones. The iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph was transmitted from Guam to New York City via radiofacsimile in 1945 — reaching American newspaper front pages within hours of being taken.
The Birth of the Modern Office Fax Machine (1960s–1979)
For most of its history, fax technology required specialist equipment, dedicated transmission lines, and technical operators. That changed in the 1960s.
Xerox LDX and Magnafax Telecopier (1964–1966)
Xerox Corporation introduced the LDX (Long Distance Xerography) in 1964, widely considered the first commercialized version of a machine recognizable as a modern fax.
In 1966, Xerox released the Magnafax Telecopier — and this was the real turning point. It weighed 46 pounds (21 kg), it transmitted a letter-sized document in approximately six minutes, and critically: it connected to any standard telephone handset.
No special wiring, no trained operator, no dedicated circuit. Any office with a telephone could now send a fax. The infrastructure for the fax revolution was in place.
Digital Fax and the DACOM Rapidfax (Late 1960s)
While Xerox was making fax accessible, a company called DACOM was making it fast. The DACOM Rapidfax, first sold in the late 1960s, was the first digital fax machine — incorporating compression algorithms developed from Lockheed research to dramatically reduce transmission time.
The DACOM 412 Secure Fax won the IR-100 Award in 1973 as the first digital sub-minute facsimile. DACOM's patents would eventually become "the foundation of the modern desktop fax machine," as the company's own documentation described them.
The ITU Standards Problem: Why Every Machine Was Incompatible
One thing held fax back through the 1960s and 1970s: manufacturers deliberately built incompatible transmission protocols to lock in customers. A Xerox machine could not communicate with an IBM machine. A Qwip terminal could not talk to a 3M terminal.
The ITU (International Telecommunication Union) attempted to address this with the Group 1 standard in 1968 (6 minutes per page, analog) and Group 2 in 1976 (3 minutes per page, analog). Both reduced the problem but did not eliminate it. The machines were still expensive, slow by modern standards, and the market remained fragmented.
The Group 3 Standard Changes Everything (1980)
The single most important date in fax history after 1843 is 1980.
The ITU's CCITT Group 3 standard (Recommendations T.4 and T.30) introduced:
- Digital transmission — the first digital fax standard
- 40 seconds per page at the original specification (6–15 seconds in practice with compression)
- Modified Huffman (MH) compression — codebook-based encoding that massively reduced data volume
- Universal interoperability — any Group 3 machine from any manufacturer could communicate with any other
The T.30 protocol specified the complete call setup: the handshake tones that negotiate resolution, compression, and speed before a single line of image data is sent. That screeching noise when a fax machine picks up a call? That is T.30 — unchanged in its fundamentals since 1980.
What Group 3 Actually Meant
Before 1980, buying a fax machine meant committing to one vendor's ecosystem. After 1980, a Sharp machine in Tokyo could fax a Honda contract to a Ricoh machine in Detroit. Universal interoperability transformed fax from a specialist technology into a universal business utility.
For reference on how the underlying fax protocol works, see our detailed guide to how fax machines work.
The Fax Boom: When Fax Became Ubiquitous (1980s–Early 1990s)
The Group 3 standard combined with falling hardware prices — driven heavily by Japanese manufacturers including Sharp, Canon, Panasonic, and Ricoh competing aggressively — drove a global adoption explosion.
Machines that cost several thousand dollars in the 1970s fell below $500 by the mid-1980s. "Fax me that" became standard business parlance. Every office, law firm, hospital, real estate agency, and newsroom had at least one machine.
Japanese Fax Culture
Japan's fax adoption was uniquely deep, for a specific linguistic reason: kanji characters were difficult to type on early keyboards, but trivially easy to write and fax. A Japanese businessperson could handwrite a complex document and transmit it in minutes — far faster than composing it digitally.
By the early 1990s, fax machine ownership was ubiquitous in Japanese businesses and common in homes. As recently as 2020, faxes were available at over 81% of Japanese convenience stores. COVID-19 pandemic case reporting — still conducted by fax in Japan — caused counting errors and delays that prompted administrative reform minister Taro Kono to publicly "declare war on faxes" in September 2020.
The First PC Fax Board (1985)
In 1985, Hank Magnuski of GammaLink Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, produced the GammaFax — the first computer fax board. For the first time, a personal computer could send and receive faxes directly, without a standalone fax machine. The GammaLink fax board was enshrined at the Smithsonian Institution in 1992 — a marker of its historical significance.
PC fax boards were the direct precursor to software-based internet fax. The same shift from hardware to software that happened to music (CDs to streaming) and photography (film to digital) happened to fax — just over a longer timeline.
The Decline: Email Takes Over (Mid-1990s–2000s)
The World Wide Web went public in 1991. Email became mainstream in business through the mid-1990s. The fax machine's peak was brief by historical standards — roughly 1986 to 1996.
Email displaced fax for most purposes because it was:
- Free to send (versus per-page transmission costs and phone charges)
- Instantly searchable and storable (versus a pile of thermal paper that faded within years)
- Editable (versus a scanned image that could not be easily modified)
- Reliable delivery confirmation built into the protocol
- Scalable to any volume without additional hardware
The ITU responded not by abandoning fax but by adapting it. In 1998, the T.38 standard (Fax over IP) was published — enabling fax transmissions to travel over internet infrastructure. A Group 3 fax machine from 1985 could now send to an online fax service in 2024 without either party knowing the difference.
For a deeper look at how modern fax over IP works, see our T.38 fax protocol guide.
The ITU also standardized T.37 (store-and-forward fax via email), and online fax services — sending and receiving faxes through a web interface with no hardware at all — became commercially viable by the late 1990s.
Why Fax Machines Are Still Used Today
The fax machine's persistence is not nostalgia. It serves specific needs that email has not fully replaced.
Healthcare (the largest remaining sector in the US):
- Point-to-point fax transmission has a clear audit trail without intermediate servers storing protected health information
- Unencrypted email is a HIPAA risk; a properly configured fax-to-fax transmission is not
- In 2018, two-thirds of Canadian doctors reported fax as their primary communication method
- As of 2017, the UK National Health Service was described as "the world's largest purchaser of fax machines," with at least 11,620 machines active across NHS facilities
For more on fax and healthcare compliance, see our guide to HIPAA-compliant faxing.
Legal and government:
- In many jurisdictions, faxed contracts with signature copies carry legal weight while electronic signatures do not
- Courts, the IRS, and government agencies in the US, Germany, and Japan continue to accept and sometimes require faxed documents
- COVID-19 exposed this dependency dramatically: Germany's public health fax infrastructure caused reporting delays; the US CDC's paper-based disease reporting system included significant fax components
What fax looks like today: Most faxing no longer involves a physical machine. Online fax services like mFax.to let you send and receive faxes from a smartphone or browser — no hardware, no phone line, no paper. The recipient's machine (physical or online) cannot tell the difference from a traditional fax. The 1980-era Group 3 protocol still handles the transmission.
Fax Is Alive in the Cloud
mFax.to uses the same T.30/Group 3 protocol that has connected fax machines since 1980 — delivered from your phone. Over 5 million users send faxes without touching a fax machine.
Complete Fax Machine History Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1843 | Alexander Bain receives British Patent No. 9745 (May 27) — the first fax patent |
| 1848 | Frederick Bakewell improves Bain's design with synchronized rotating cylinders |
| 1851 | Bakewell demonstrates improved telefax at the Great Exhibition in London |
| 1865 | Giovanni Caselli's Pantelegraph: world's first commercial facsimile service, Paris–Lyon |
| 1881 | Shelford Bidwell creates the scanning phototelegraph — first photocell image scanner |
| 1888 | Elisha Gray patents the telautograph (July 31) |
| 1906 | Arthur Korn transmits a photograph 1,800 km — first news photo by wire |
| 1907 | Édouard Belin invents the Bélinographe; Korn's tech used to catch a bank robber in London |
| 1914 | Bélinographe used for journalistic photos — first mass adoption of fax imagery |
| 1924 | AT&T transmits 15 photos by telephone (May 19); RCA sends first transatlantic radio photo (Nov 29) |
| 1925 | AT&T wirephoto commences commercial operations |
| 1935 | Associated Press launches Wirephoto service — industrializes news photo transmission |
| 1945 | Iwo Jima flag photo transmitted from Guam to New York via radiofacsimile |
| 1948 | Western Union introduces the compact Deskfax machine |
| 1964 | Xerox introduces LDX (Long Distance Xerography) — first commercialized modern fax |
| 1966 | Xerox Magnafax Telecopier: 46 lbs, 6 min/page, connects to any telephone handset |
| 1968 | ITU Group 1 standard (T.2): 6 minutes per page, analog |
| Late 1960s | DACOM Rapidfax: first digital fax machine with compression |
| 1973 | DACOM 412 wins IR-100 Award as first digital sub-minute facsimile |
| 1976 | ITU Group 2 standard (T.3): 3 minutes per page, analog |
| 1980 | ITU Group 3 standard (T.4, T.30): digital, 40 sec/page, universal interoperability — the turning point |
| 1985 | GammaFax: first computer fax board — PC can send and receive fax without hardware |
| Late 1980s | Fax machines ubiquitous in offices worldwide — peak fax era begins |
| 1991 | World Wide Web goes public |
| 1992 | GammaLink fax board enshrined at the Smithsonian Institution |
| Mid-1990s | Email becomes mainstream; online fax services begin to emerge |
| 1996 | HIPAA enacted (August 21) — reinforces fax use in healthcare |
| 1998 | ITU T.38 (Fax over IP) standardized — fax adapted for internet infrastructure |
| 2017 | UK NHS described as 'world's largest purchaser of fax machines' |
| 2020 | Japan declares policy to reduce fax use; COVID-19 exposes fax dependency in Germany, US, and Japan |
The Fax Machine and the Modern World
The fax machine is one of the few technologies that spans nearly two centuries of innovation. It began as a clockwork curiosity in 1843, became a commercial tool in 1865, found its first mass market in the newspaper industry in the 1920s, transformed into a universal business appliance in the 1980s, and survived the internet era by migrating from hardware to software.
Today, the cloud fax services that replaced physical machines still speak the same T.30 protocol that ITU engineers standardized in 1980. The screeching handshake tone from a fax call — a sound that felt distinctly 20th century — is still being generated and decoded billions of times a year.
The technology that Alexander Bain patented 182 years ago has never fully stopped. It just changed what it runs on.
mFax.to lets you send faxes from your phone in under two minutes — no machine, no phone line, no paper — with the same reliability the protocol has carried since the 1980s.