facsimile

3 Articles

Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s

April 25, 2023 by 52 Comments

Remember fax machines? They used to be all the rage, and to be honest it was pretty cool to be able to send images back and forth over telephone lines. By the early 2000s, pretty much everyone had some kind of fax capability, whether thanks to a dedicated fax machine, a fax modem, or an all-in-one printer. But then along came the smartphone that allowed you to snap a picture of a document and send it by email or text, and along with the decrease in landline subscriptions, facsimile has pretty much become a technological dead end.

But long before fax machines became commonplace, there was a period during which sending images by wire was a very big deal indeed. So much so that General Motors produced “Spot News,” a short film to demonstrate how newspapers leveraged telephone technology to send photographs from the field. The film is very much of the “March of Progress” genre, and seems to be something that would have been included along with the newsreels and Looney Tunes between the double feature films. It shows a fictional newsroom in The Big City, where a cub reporter gets a hot tip about an airplane stunt about to be attempted out in the sticks. The editor doesn’t want to miss out on a scoop, so he sends a photographer and a reporter to the remote location to cover the stunt, along with a technology-packed photographic field car. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s” →

Will The Fax Machine Ever Stop Singing?

November 16, 2022 by 43 Comments

Throughout the 80s and 90s, you couldn’t swing a stapler around any size office without hitting a fax machine. But what is it about the fax machine that makes it the subject of so much derision? Is it the beep-boops? The junk faxes? Or do they just seem horribly outdated in the world of cloud storage and thumb drives? Perhaps all of the above is true. While I may be Hackaday’s resident old school office worker et cetera, it may surprise you to learn that I don’t have a fax machine. In fact, the last time I had to fax something, I recall having to give my email address to some website in order to send a single fax for free.

Over across the pond, the UK government has decided to nix the requirement for fax services under something called the Universal Service Order (USO) legislation, which essentially ensures that residents all across the UK have access to phone services at a price they can afford. The UK’s Office of Communications, aka Ofcom, have announced recently that they are in agreement with the government. Since the industry is moving away from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to IP telephony, the fax machine won’t work the same way.

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Retrotechtacular: Electronic Publishing In The 1930s

December 22, 2015 by 12 Comments

We are living in the age of citizen journalism and the 24-hour news cycle. Reports about almost anything newsworthy can be had from many perspectives, both vetted and amateur. Just a few decades ago, people relied on daily newspapers, radio, and word of mouth for their news. On the brink of the television age, several radio stations in the United States participated in an experiment to broadcast news over radio waves. But this was no ordinary transmission. At the other end, a new type of receiver printed out news stories, line drawings, and pictures on a long roll of paper.

Radio facsimile newspaper technology was introduced to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair at two different booths. One belonged to an inventor named William Finch, and one to RCA. Finch had recently made a name for himself with his talking newspaper, which embedded audio into a standard newspaper in the form of wavy lines along the edges that were read by a special device.

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