Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Fast Fax - A Long History And A Modern Truth

The facsimile, or fax as we call it today was one of the earliest concepts in modern technology. First patented in 1843 by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain, the fax is an encoding and/or imaging method that reads text and/or images in small areas at a time, assigns numerical values based on darkness and lightness and then transmits them to a receiver. The receiver produces corresponding marks on paper as the transmitting fax proceeds to scan the next lower line continuing until the entire document has been scanned, digitized and transmitted. We typically think of the fax as transmitting documents via telephone line, but history verifies that Bain patented his original invention 33 years before the telephone and Morse code became standard transmission methods. The fa View the rest of this article


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