Faxing Then and Now
Home -> Truth -> Fax -> Fax History  | Alexander Bain |
What happened in the year 1843 that would eventually impact your working life? The fashion re-emergence of the hoop dress you say? How about the publishing of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens? Though you may be of the strong opinion that the only way your boss could become less of a “Scrooge” would be through ghostly intervention, you are, unfortunately, missing the mark. | 
| Caselli's pantelegraph tinfoil mechanism |
1843 was the year a Scottish inventor, Alexander Bain, developed the original concept still used in fax machines today. Though Bain’s invention – the chemical telegraph – wasn’t actually patented until December of 1846, he is still considered the “father of the facsimile.” Other inventors such as Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli and American inventor Elisha Gray also made later contributions to the development of modern fax machines. However Bain is still considered the main man.  | Giovanni Caselli pantelegraph image 10 Feb 1862 from Paris to Lyons. |
Flash forward to 1994. While the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was going into effect and Tonya Harding’s accomplices were focusing on Nancy Kerrigan’s right leg, a young international recording artist grew tired of missing important messages and faxes during his many travels. Drawing on his high-tech background, he set about inventing an integrated messaging network that would deliver faxes and voicemail via an already-existing, universally-accessible channel: the Internet. The artist was Jaye Muller, and the vision he developed swiftly grew into JFAX.COM, a multi-million dollar corporation that offered nothing less than a dramatic lifestyle upgrade in the way people communicated and did business in the 90s and beyond. |