The Facts about Fax machines

The podcast "Facts About Fax Machines" discusses the history and decline of fax machines. It mentions that the fax machine was a significant innovation in communication, developed around 30 years before the telephone. In the 1980s, fax machines experienced a surge in sales and became widely used in businesses and households. However, the rise of the internet eventually rendered fax machines obsolete, as online services provided more efficient communication methods such as scanning technologies and emails. Despite its decline, the fax machine played a crucial role in paving the way for current technologies. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Cole Teegs and I'm a first-year student here at the University of Toronto Mississauga. And for those of you who don't know, this podcast, Facts About Fax Machines, transmits information about one of the oldest communication devices that, with great regret, has become obsolete in today's society, the fax machine. And I think it's necessary for us to begin with its creation. As we all know, one of the most significant innovations in communications came with the invention of electrical telegraphs in 1834. Hell, my first communications professor, Dan Guagnolo, was obsessed with the technology, ensuring all of us first-year students knew how communications really began to progress. The first big innovation to come with telegraphs happened around ten years after its invention. Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor, had begun experimenting on a machine called the Fascimile machine. It was noted to be a technology built off of the telegraph that would convert an image projected to and from a cylinder. In other words, it was a telegraph that sent images rather than messages. Yes, there were struggles in the beginning, specifically with the quality of image, but developments were soon to come. It's incredible how little recognition the fax machine gets. And I think it's due to the new forms we see, images and messages shared online that rendered the fax machine useless to the average person. But it's important to note that the invention occurred around 30 years prior to the more prized technology that is Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. For the sake of this podcast, we have to make a big jump to the prime of the fax machine's history. About 150 years after its creation, and many progressions later, the 1980s saw a huge surge in fax sales. At this point, fax machines could be transmitted using any telephone line, and higher standards were set on the quality of the actual machines. GammaLink, an American software company, developed the first computer-running fax machines. The fax machine was peaking, and could be found in about every business on the planet, and just about every household as well. It was cheap, required few resources, and efficiently transmitted detailed messages. The only thing standing in its way would be another technological progression. The Internet allowed for an even more efficient practice, at least regarding the functions of a fax machine. Online services were standard, and quicker than ever. This brings us to the end of our incredible journey on the underdog of communications. What began as a technological progression was eventually shut down by a progression technology itself. We use so many things in society daily because of the fax machine. The two most prominent are the everyday use of scanning technologies, and perhaps the most important, emails. The fax machine will never be forgotten, and is a stepping stone towards the ease of our current technology. Thank you for listening, and have a good day.