Which was the first fax machine in commercial use? When was fax introduced for public service?
The first FAX MACHINE in commercial use was the Pantelegraph developed by Fr. Giovanni Caseili of Florence between 1857 and 1864 and introduced for public service over the existing Paris—Lyons telegraph line on 16 May 1865. Two years later the service was extended to Marseilles. The apparatus used for transmitting and receiving stood six foot tall and comprised an electrically charged pendulum which scanned the text to be transmitted. The recording paper was soaked in potassium cyanide and changed colour each time an electrical impulse passed through it. By 1868 the system was capable of transmitting 110 fax pages an hour with outstanding quality of reproduction. Although during the four years of its existence the Pantelegraph was used mainly for the transmission of stock market reports, it was also used for sending engravings and technical drawings of great detail and complexity.
The first OFFICE FAX was the Xerox LDX, unveiled at the company’s New York showroom on 52nd Street on 5 May 1964. The equipment was vast, requiring separate units for scanning, transmission and receiving, and could only be used over dedicated telephone lines or wideband microwave, not ordinary telephone lines. It was therefore targeted at businesses with centralized high-volume applications, such as department stores for dispatching orders to the warehouse, banks for urgent inter-branch document transmission and railroads for waybills giving train and freight information. Rental was $ 850 a month including paper for up to 10,000 faxes. Line charges were extra.
The first fax OPERATING OVER NORMAL TELEPHONE LINES and the first desktop model was the Xerox Magnafax Telecopier, which used a carbon impact printer to reproduce on plain paper and could transmit a page in six minutes. Launched in April 1966, it weighed 46 lbs and was only a little larger than a standard typewriter.
A limiting factor during the early years of office faxing was that machines could only communicate with compatible models. This was eventually overcome in 1974 when a UN committee set international standards which ensured that the new generation of faxes would be able to communicate with each other regardless of their make or country of origin.
By this date there were about 30,000 fax machines in the USA, the main user. In tile same year the Japanese entered the market they would rapidly dominate when the Richoh Company of Tokyo produced the Rifax 600 S, the first machine to transmit over ordinary telephone lines in under a minute. It was launched on both the USA and European markets and caused the second revolution in faxing; while the Americans had made the technology compact and simple enough for general office use, the Japanese now made it fast enough for almost instant communication.
In Britain the Remotecopier KD El was introduced by Plessey Communication Systems of Surbiton, Surrey in the early part of 1972. This was advertised as a ‘Facsimile Transmission’ system; the abbreviation `fax’ did not come into general use for at least another ten years. Its first appearance in The Times was an article by Russell Jones on 13 March 1984 headed ‘What is FAX ?’
The first COLOUR FAX MACHINE was introduced by the Tokyo electronics company Sharp in 1990 at a price equivalent of £ 14,000. Transmission of a high quality copy of an 8 in x 10 in colour picture took three minutes.
