Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine

Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology

by Jonathan Coopersmith

Faxed is the first history of the facsimile machine--the most famous recent example of a tool made obsolete by relentless technological innovation. Jonathan Coopersmith recounts the multigenerational, multinational history of the device from its origins to its workplace glory days, in the process revealing how it helped create the accelerated communications, information flow, and vibrant visual culture that characterize our contemporary world.

Most people assume that the fax machine originated in the computer and electronics revolution of the late twentieth century, but it was actually invented in 1843. Almost 150 years passed between the fax's invention in England and its widespread adoption in tech-savvy Japan, where it still enjoys a surprising popularity. Over and over again, faxing's promise to deliver messages instantaneously paled before easier, less expensive modes of communication: first telegraphy, then radio and television, and finally digitalization in the form of email, the World Wide Web, and cell phones. By 2010, faxing had largely disappeared, having fallen victim to the same technological and economic processes that had created it.

Based on archival research and interviews spanning two centuries and three continents, Coopersmith's book recovers the lost history of a once-ubiquitous technology. Written in accessible language that should appeal to engineers and policymakers as well as historians, Faxed explores themes of technology push and market pull, user-based innovation, and "blackboxing" (the packaging of complex skills and technologies into packages designed for novices) while revealing the inventions inspired by the fax, how the demand for fax machines eventually caught up with their availability, and why subsequent shifts in user preferences rendered them mostly pass�.

Genres: Technology, History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2015

About the author

A historian of technology, Jonathan Coopersmith, is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University.

Reviews

[David Czuba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technology historian Jonathan Coopersmith dials up a thoroughly researched text on the lowly fax machine. As banal as my generation thinks faxing is, readers will be shocked to discover the Industrial Revolution beginnings of facsimile, the patent battles to bring technology to market, and the high comparative costs that burdened pictures by telegraph until the microelectronic age breathed new life into it. The author frequently pitches quantities sent and sold among the decades, which does tend to detract from the story, which shrinks and grows more tight as the book wears on. He gives us a timeworn perspective describing contemporary technologies, only getting to the telephone as fax reached its 40th year. Astute readers will note that the applications of fax always kept it in the background almost as a luxury Veblen good affordable for its speed over post, especially transoceanic transmissions. Today's insistence on immediate, secure, and high-quality scanning technology makes fax seem absolutely dusty, but Coopersmith gives us a fresh telling of its primary users in Japan, the health care field, and among attorneys. At a time when no one else would or could touch this subject, Coopersmith took on the project as an attraction started by his mother's purchase of a machine for the home. He delved deep into archives to root out the story of this technology, which goes down as a lesson for those marketing high technology that people should well heed in this age of Facebook: selling an idea requires user demand, and a market simply won't appear because the technology is astounding.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Coopersmith has written the definitive history of fax technology. The book covers fax from its earliest days, starting with the original invention by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain. The focus of the book is how the path to the wildly popular fax machines of the Eighties and Nineties had a very bumpy road on the way to successful commercialization. Coopersmith specializes in the historical aspects of technology and does a good job in explaining how difficult it was to realize the goal of sending image documents from one place to another. In its first century, fax traveled mostly over lines designed for telegraphic communications and the advent of higher quality phone lines was just one of the prerequisites needed for fax communications to work well.

I met Coopersmith twice while he was writing this book and provided some background information based on my experiences in the computer fax industry and the related fax standards groups. Fax confounded the experts and made communications simple when compared to numerous alternatives that were more complex. Ultimately, the Internet changed everything and took over some of the communication roles that fax had dominated in the early Nineties. Fax still is used in some business scenarios, but is now one of many ways to communicate. Coopersmith's fax saga offers valuable examples and lessons for technologists on how technology alone is not enough for success. Fax met market needs with its ease of use and deployment over common phone lines. The book tells this tale well and also does a good job in explaining why Japan became the center of developments that made the fax machine popular and ubiquitous.