¿Cuándo se inventó la máquina de fax? Origen, evolución y declive

"Facsimile" comes from the Latin fac simile, meaning "make similar." It describes an exact copy of a document or image, not just any file transfer. That is why early inventors called their machines "printing telegraphs" or "phototelegraphs" long before "fax," a shortened form of facsimile, became common shorthand in the 1940s.

Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented the first fax device, the "Electric Printing Telegraph," on May 27, 1843 (British Patent No. 9745), using synchronized pendulums to scan an image line by line. Frederick Bakewell and Shelford Bidwell later refined the scanning method, and Giovanni Caselli built the first version reliable enough to sell commercially.

Alexander Bain holds the original 1843 patent, but inventing the fax machine was really a relay. Bakewell fixed Bain's synchronization problem in 1848, Caselli made it commercially viable by 1865, and Xerox turned it into the office appliance we picture today with the 1966 Magnafax Telecopier. No single person built the fax machine we think of now.

Before Xerox, the most significant "first" was Giovanni Caselli's Pantelegraph, which ran the world's first commercial fax service between Paris and Lyon starting in 1865, mostly to verify bank signatures remotely. It predates Xerox's 1966 Magnafax Telecopier, the first fax machine that could plug into any ordinary telephone line, by exactly a century.

A telegraph sends coded text, originally Morse code, that has to be decoded at the other end. A fax sends an exact visual copy, a signature, a diagram, a handwritten note, reproduced line by line rather than translated into symbols first. That distinction is why fax became the standard for signatures and legal documents, while telegraphs never could.

Email is free, instant, and easy to search, but it is also easy to spoof and often distrusted for signatures and legally binding documents. A completed fax transmission produces a delivery confirmation with a timestamp that many courts, government agencies, and healthcare providers still treat as stronger proof of receipt than an email read-receipt.

Fax machines peaked roughly between 1986 and 1996, after the 1980 ITU Group 3 standard let any manufacturer's machine talk to any other, and before email became a mainstream business tool. Prices fell below $500 by the mid-1980s, and "fax me that" became standard office language during this decade-long window.