Do you ever wonder how a fax machine, such an indispensable unit in one’s business these days came into practice?, Well the answer is, Mr. Alexander Bain of Scottish origin.  He created a back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism making use of his knowledge of electric clock pendulums. His model was designed to receive signals from a telegraph wire and then convert them into images on paper. Fredrick Blakwell, another inventor from London, patented a similar machine in the year 1851 and called it a “copying telegraph”. Blakewell had introduced several improvements in Bain’s original model and further developed his device.

“Pan Telegraph”, the first fax machine to be sold, was marketed by Giovanni Caselli in 1861 and surprisingly this took place before even workable telephones were created. The models available in the market today have acquired their design after a long series of refinements and developments.

The first coloured version appeared in the year 1924. The first colour facsimile was transmitted and reconstructed by H.E Ives of American Telephone and Telegraph. The “Hellschreiber”, an early technique in fax transmission was invented in 1929 by Rudolf Hell. But the fact remains to be seen that fax machines had never attained such popular usage until the mid 1980s. The implementation of a standard protocol in the year 1983 for transmitting faxes at rates of 9,600 bps (bits per second) is the significant factor behind this colossal transformation that accounts for the fact that most modern offices use a fax machine.