Today, the FAX newspaper. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
I watched a 1948 Jimmy
Stewart movie on TV the other evening, Call
Northside 777. It had one startling detail.
Toward the end, Stewart cleared an innocent man by
getting a FAX copy of an old photo from another
city -- a FAX in 1948! The movie makes a big deal
of it - makes it into the high technology of 50
years ago.
Actually, 1948 was late in the game for FAX
machines. By the early nineteenth century we had
photographic cameras as well as the new telegraph
systems. Suddenly we could capture an image, and we
could transmit a message -- both almost
instantaneously.
A Scot named Alexander Bain patented a primitive
FAX machine in 1843, only six years after Morse's
telegraph. By 1865 a commercial FAX system was
operating between Lyons and Paris. Those systems
were cumbersome. You couldn't just copy from paper.
You had first to create an image on some form of
metal sheet or block.
German scientist Arthur Korn built the forerunner
of modern FAX machines in 1902. Korn's device used
a light-sensitive scanner to read images from
regular paper. Five years later he had a commercial
system running. In 1925 AT&T began public FAX
service in the United States. They called it
Wirephoto. The technology has changed, but
you still see AP Wirephoto images in your
newspapers.
Now writer George Mannes tells about another
variant on the FAX machine -- William Finch's
facsimile newspaper. Finch took an interest in FAX
machines in 1920 and amassed 200 patents while he
worked for Hearst's International News Service. In
1935 he set up a company to sell his own FAX
system. His design had a lot in common with Bain's
machine. A light swinging on a pendulum moved over
a slow-moving paper strip, four inches wide. It
picked up and transmitted a hundred lines of light
and darkness per inch.
The big push to sell the machine took place right
after WW-II. Finch set out to place a FAX machine
in every living room. He meant to bring newspapers
into our homes electronically. Proponents put radio
under attack. "In the history of humanity it is
never the spoken word [used] by ... backward
tribes, but the inscribed tablet ... the
written word [has built] knowledge." (I
guess that makes a primitive tribe of you and me!)
Newspapers were just buying into the idea when
Jimmy Stewart made that 1948 movie. Intentionally
or not, he was part of the advertising blitz. But
we consumers never took the bait. Finch's FAX
newspaper became one more technological dead end,
while we all went out and bought TV sets. The
company went bankrupt in 1952.
New technologies ride a thin line. You and I still read the morning
paper. But we also click on the Web to check news
articles. In that sense, Finch's electronic
newspaper is here in our houses, after all. TV,
radio, newspapers, and the Web are all clamoring
for our favor, and we're no nearer to sorting them
all out than we were in 1948.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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