History of FAX, totally OT

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 February 2005 19:39, Carroll Grigsby wrote:
>On Thursday 03 February 2005 09:48 am, Gordon Keehn wrote:
>> >    *Fax machines have actually been around since at least the
>> > 1800's. A mechanical device which carved wood was set up in two
>> > towns in France for some kind of exposition, with just a wire
>> > between the two towns. It actually worked, and the idea's been
>> > around since then, building slowly through the 1970's when my
>> > Dad owned a service for faxing checks between truckstops and
>> > transportation companies.  Not a new idea, for a long time.
>>
>>     Those old enough to remember "Dragnet" in the '50s (Jack Webb,
>> Ben Alexander, and they don't make 'em like that anymore!) saw
>> occasional glimpses of a gadget with a sheet of paper wrapped
>> around a rapidly revolving drum, with a solenoid-controlled pen to
>> draw the image.  I don't recall what they called it but as a young
>> teen, I thought it was next thing to magic.
>>     Cheers,
>> Gordon Keehn

And I believe that may have been a Fairchild Scanagraver or some 
variation of it.  The actual scanagraver was a device for carving an 
image copy with a tiny chisel driven by the britness of the image 
being copied, using a fairly coarse, 65 or 75 dpi, engraved version 
of what became in later years, the half-tone process.  The plastic 
sheet, once engraved, was then removed from the drum and glued to a 
flat block of cherry an inch thick, ready to be inked and put on the 
front page of the weekly rag with the normal output of a linotype 
machine wrapped around it.

It would have been a simple matter to replace the plastic sheet with 
paper, and bang it with a pen, and was one of the ways that 
newspapers shared important pictures in the late 40's and early 50's.
Occasionally, you could even recognize the folks in the pictures, it 
was that bad.  Wire photos that way were quit expensive as the 
britness info back then was a variable frequency oscilator, and that 
was very slow, about 50 dots of the picture a second over the voice 
grade lines of the day.  One picture was a major long distance bill 
from ma bell.  Locally made copies were pretty good though.  Not as 
good as todays offset stuff, but usable.

That I have to admit, was a 'few' years ago but I was there as an 
early teener, doing darkroom work at the time, learning the chemistry 
of the business.

>Back in the late 40's, I read an electronics-for-teens book that
> described a fax system that had been in use in the US prior to
> World War II to transmit the local newspaper via AM radio to
> readers. The transmission was done during the overnight period when
> the station would normally have been off of the air. The receiver
> used a heated element mounted at the end of an arm that scanned
> across a coated paper, burning the transmitted image into the
> paper, and required an internal connection to the radio. The paper
> came in roll form, and was perhaps six or eight inches wide. The
> reader turned the radio on at night, and in the morning would have
> a fresh copy of the paper. No more going out on a rainy morning in
> robe and slippers to search through the shrubbery trying to find
> the paper!
>
>The service was dropped at the start of the war and never revived.
>
>-- cmg

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.