History of the fax
Twelve dates, from a Scottish clockmaker in 1843 to fax over the internet.
The fax was born in 1843, thirty-three years before the telephone: the Scotsman Alexander Bain patented a machine that scans a surface and reproduces its markings at a distance. The principle has never changed since. What changed is the carrier — telegraph wire, telephone line, then IP network — and the speed: from six minutes a page in 1966 to under a minute with the Group 3 standard published in 1980, the one still in force today.
The timeline
1843
The founding patent
Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, patents an electric printing telegraph: two synchronised pendulums scan a raised surface and reproduce its markings at the other end of the wire. Scan, transmit, rebuild line by line — the principle of the fax is set before the telephone is even invented.
1865
The first commercial service
Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph enters service between Paris and Lyon, then Marseille. The French administration runs a genuine paid service for transmitting handwriting and signatures. For want of enough traffic, it closes after a few years.
1907
Pictures down the wire
Arthur Korn transmits photographs between Berlin, Paris and London. The press becomes the first mass customer for remote image transmission: a news photograph can finally travel faster than a train.
1924
The telephone line becomes the carrier
AT&T sends press photographs over its commercial telephone lines. Two years later, radiophotography crosses the Atlantic. The telephone, designed for voice, becomes a network for moving documents.
1966
The office machine
Xerox releases the Magnafax Telecopier: a device an employee can plug into any telephone line unaided, at six minutes a page. The fax leaves newsrooms and government offices and enters ordinary ones.
1968
The first standard, and the right to plug in
The CCITT — the forerunner of the ITU-T — standardises Group 1 (recommendation T.2): six minutes a page in analogue, but at last a shared language. That same year in the United States, the Carterfone decision allows third-party devices to be connected to the telephone network, opening the market.
1976
Group 2 halves the time
Recommendation T.3 brings a page down to about three minutes. It is still analogue: the machine transmits an image without ever understanding it or truly compressing it.
1980
Group 3, the one that swept the board
The CCITT publishes T.4, which describes the digital encoding of the page, and T.30, which describes the dialogue between the two machines. The result: under a minute a page on an ordinary telephone line, with a confirmation issued by the receiving device itself. It is the standard every fax still follows today — including those sent from MondialFax.
1984
Group 4, faster and forever marginal
Recommendation T.6 targets ISDN: faster and sharper, but it assumes a digital line end to end and compatible machines on both sides. The installed base stays on Group 3, and Group 4 never takes hold.
1998
The fax leaves the copper
The ITU-T approves T.38: at the edge of the network a gateway demodulates the fax machine's signal, carries the pages as IP packets, then remodulates them on the way out. Without it, a fax over a VoIP line fails half the time; with it, it crosses the internet without either machine noticing.
2010
Fax without a fax machine
Web fax services become mainstream: no machine, no dedicated line, no paper — a document and a number are enough. MondialFax opens that year and has not changed its principle since.
Since 2020
The copper switch-off
European operators are gradually closing the switched telephone network. Fax machines plugged into an analogue socket lose their line, area by area, and must go through an adapter or an online service. The machine disappears; the fax number stays reachable.
Why a standard from 1980 was never replaced
Group 3 won because it required exactly what everyone already had: an ordinary telephone line. Its successors demanded a network the subscriber had to have installed first. A communication standard does not prevail because it is better, but because both ends can use it without changing anything.
Network effects did the rest. Every machine bought made all the others slightly more useful, and a decade of installed base made replacement costlier than keeping. In 1998, T.38 cut the knot elegantly: instead of replacing Group 3, it carries it.
That is why a fax from 1985 and a fax sent from a browser in 2026 still understand each other. They speak the same T.30; only the route between them has changed.
What is left of the fax today
The fax machine as an object is at the end of its life: it assumes an analogue line that operators are shutting down. The fax as a service depends on no hardware at all — it is a number, a document and a delivery confirmation.
That confirmation is the one thing email still does not reliably provide, and it is why healthcare, the courts and public administration keep asking for a fax number. The technology is 180 years old; the need it covers has not aged.
Frequently asked questions about the history of the fax
- Who invented the fax?
- Alexander Bain, in 1843, for the principle and the patent. Giovanni Caselli, in 1865, for the first commercial service. But the fax as we know it — a page in under a minute over a telephone line — dates from the Group 3 standard published by the CCITT in 1980, which is collective work rather than one person's invention.
- Is the fax really older than the telephone?
- Yes. Alexander Bain's patent dates from 1843; Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent from 1876. The fax therefore predates by thirty-three years the network it would eventually run on.
- Which standard does a fax use today?
- Group 3, meaning recommendation T.4 for encoding the page and T.30 for the dialogue between machines, both published in 1980. When the transmission goes over the internet, T.38 is added to carry that same dialogue in IP packets.
- Will the fax disappear?
- The device very probably will, as the copper network is switched off. The fax number will not: it is still required by organisations that need proof of delivery, and it now works without a dedicated line. It is the hardware that is disappearing, not the service.
Continue exploring
The most useful pages to carry on with your fax.
- A 1980 technology still in service: the reasons are technical and organisational, not sentimental.
- From the scanned page to the printed document at the other end, step by step.
- Seven criteria, three channels, and the question that actually decides.
- The fourteen terms you meet when trying to send or receive a fax.