Fax Transmittal: Fill & Download for Free

“Available”, you ask? There were some technologies that were available then that weren’t substantially used.Wireless. Radio. Yes, the communications medium that you thought was much later. And no, I don’t mean induction a short distance thru the ground. And I don’t mean photo-phone. I mean the kind where at one location there’s an antenna and ground, and at the other another antenna and ground, miles apart. And by the 1880s, this invention was…old! And unused. Mahlon Loomis had demonstrated the process in the mid-1860s, using kites to tap for power the same sky-to-ground potential that Franklin did, with a telegraph key to ground to send, and a spark gap to ground to receive. It worked only when the kites were at the same height above ground, because then the wires were resonant. Loomis thought he was completing a DC circuit thru the sky with return via ground, which was incorrect; he was actually doing it the way we know now that radios work, with the keying overlaying r.f. transients on the DC the sky-to-ground was producing. But was unable to get commercial or military adoption of his US patented technology.Not only that, but with the improved Bell telephone of 1877, Loomis demonstrated sound transmission years before you thought people were even sending Morse code wirelessly. Since a carbon microphone would impose an audio frequency envelope (albeit severely clipped) on the radio frequency transients, voila naive modulation, and all it would take is some inadvertent electrochemistry at the ground connection at the receiving end (forming a solid state diode by corrosion), there is your demodulator.And then there was television. Several other Quorans have mentioned the direct conversion of image to voltage as used in the improved fax transmitter of the time, but why stop at the mere transmission of an image of a flat picture? By the mid-1880s the Nipkow disc had been demonstrated, allowing any scene that could be optically focused to be converted sequentially via selenium photocell to voltages. And we already knew how to convert voltage to brightness via the incandescent lamp. The scan rate and resolution would’ve been very low at first, but can you doubt that had there been a demonstration at that time, improvements would have been rapid? I once read that in the 1890s there was closed circuit transmission of the finish line at a horse race track, but I haven’t been able to track that down since.There had also been considerable work by the 1880s with dirigible lighter-than-air aircraft. Some of the demonstrations were public, but others were trade secrets probably responsible for the “mysterious airship” sightings in the USA and then the European continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

You are in good company in over-estimating the power necessary to send messages over large line-of-sight distances. In his early (1951) novel “The Sands of Mars” Arthur C Clarke has his space travelling journalist hero type his story on a typewriter using carbon paper and then fax it back to earth taking five seconds per page using a 5 metre transmitting antenna and ‘several hundred kilowatts’ of power (Anyone under forty should Google “typewriter”, “fax” and “carbon paper”!)This mistake is particularly odd since Clarke was a communications scientist by training and is credited with inventing (or at least predicting) the geostationary communications relay satellite! Clarke’s mistake was to fail to consider that the receiving antenna, being earthbound, could be much larger than the transmitter on the spacecraft and therefore capable of picking up an exceedingly weak signal. Why he chose a fax rather than a teleprinter (both existing technology at the time), which would have required much less data per page is harder to understand though!While Clarke’s story otherwise stands up very well, another quote: “There were no mountains on Mars” reveals just how far our knowledge of the planet has advanced in the last half-century. Mars actually has the largest mountain in the Solar System as well as some of the most spectacular relief, all impossible to detect by telescope from earth.

A precursor to the “fax” machine.A letter from my father to a business friend of his described a process for “instant” transmission of letters over long distance.The sender would call a local number to dictate correspondence onto a recording device. The recording was transmitted at high speed to another recorder in the city where the recipient was located - maybe hundreds of miles away. There, a typist would play the recording at a slow enough speed to understand what was said -and proceed to type a letter, which was then delivered by same day mail or by courier to the recipient. The idea was to guarantee delivery of an “original” letter with a certain time frame, with the price set accordingly.The project involved leasing lines from AT&T between key US cities under a special tariff to allow for “wholesale” phone service. AT&T agreed, but needed permission of the FCC. Preliminary filings with the FCC had actually been submitted.The system was intended to compete with Western Union, which was still a strong presence in communications, during the late 1940’s. But telegrams were ugly, usually small transmittals, whereas Dad’s system was a fast, for about the same price, and elegant. AT&T liked it, because it gave them a kind of telegraph functionality without using actual telegraphy.As I read this letter, over and over, I realized what Dad was proposing eventually took shape as the fax machine. But early fax technology was in use at that time -especially by the military. For whatever reasons -and I’ll never know what they were- he abandoned the project. My guess is that he probably realized the service could never really be scaled.A most interesting letter to read.Hope that helps.