Fax Machine

Hello there. My name is the Fax Machine, and I have a wonderful and magical job. Have you ever wanted to send a drawing to a friend who lives far away, but you didn't want to wait for the mail? That's where I come in. I can take a picture or a letter and send a copy of it zipping through a telephone wire in just a few minutes. Long ago, before I was invented, sending a picture to someone in another city was a very slow process. You had to put it in an envelope and wait for days, sometimes even weeks, for it to arrive. It was so slow. I was created to solve that problem. I thought to myself, “I can make sharing ideas much faster.” I wanted to connect people and their amazing drawings and important words without the long wait.

My story started with a very clever inventor from Scotland named Alexander Bain. He was an expert clockmaker, and he absolutely loved figuring out how things worked. He spent his days with tiny gears and springs, making beautiful clocks that ticked and tocked perfectly. Alexander was always tinkering and thinking of new ways to use his skills. On May 27th, 1843, he had a brilliant idea. He knew about the telegraph, a machine that could send messages in beeps and boops over a long wire. He wondered if he could use what he knew about the steady ticking of a clock to send a picture instead of just dots and dashes. So, he built the very first version of me. I had a pendulum that swung back and forth, just like a grandfather clock. As it swung, a tiny pin would trace over a drawing made on a special metal plate. When the pin touched the drawing, it would send an electrical beep down the wire. On the other end, another one of me would listen to the beeps and make a matching mark on a piece of paper. It was like I was singing a picture-song over the wire.

As the years went by, I grew up and changed. I got much faster and better at my job. Soon, I was humming and whirring in busy offices all over the world. My sound was a happy one: a little whirrrr as I pulled the paper in, a bright light scanning from side to side, and then a series of beeps and boops as I sent the information on its way. People in big buildings used me to send important papers to each other instantly. Doctors could send patient information to a hospital in another city, and newspapers used me to get pictures of important events from far away right before the news was printed. I helped everyone share information in a flash. Today, you have email and phones with cameras that can send pictures even faster, but my idea was the beginning of it all. I was the one who first showed the world that you could send a picture through a wire, and that idea helped create the wonderful ways we all share our lives today.