History of FAX, totally OT

jdow jdow at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 4 13:20:32 UTC 2005


From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>

> 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.

Analog Fax had a gray scale mode. And Mil Std 161 digital facsimile
has a gray scale mode with some 8 shades of gray we could print.

> 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.

Speed was the other driving force for Group 3 facsimile. {^_-}

{^_^}




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