PEDIATRICS Vol. 94 No. 5 November 1994, pp. A30
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FAXING—150 YEARS OLD!

J. F. L. MD

Although the office fax machine has only become popular in the past decade, this year sees its 150th anniversary. It was patented on 27 May 1843, 30 years even before the telephone. But whereas the telephone quickly established itself as an essential tool for business, commercial success has been much longer coming for a machine that could transmit pictures and documents, within seconds, from one office to another.

The inventor of the idea was Alexander Bain, who was born in 1810. Bain, a Scotsman from a remote croft in Caithness, is reputed to have performed his early experiments using cattle jawbones for hinges, heather for springs and metal plates buried in the earth for batteries. He was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick and invented the first electric clock, which used electromagnetism to pull a pendulum from side to side. He then moved to London and patented his fax machine.