Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbam Here. In eight seventy eight, Alexander
Speaker 1: Graham Bell filed a patent for a history altering device
Speaker 1: called the electronic telephone. But what you may not know
Speaker 1: is that the patent for another amazing communication tool, the
Speaker 1: facts similar machine or fax machine, was filed by a
Speaker 1: Scottish clockmaker named Alexander Bain three decades earlier. That's right,
Speaker 1: fax machines predate even rudimentary telephones, and with a cockroach
Speaker 1: like survivability that makes very little sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Speaker 1: The fax machine lives on beeping and wheezing up sheets
Speaker 1: of paper the world over. For example, faxing is big
Speaker 1: in Japan. Even today, about half of Japanese families use
Speaker 1: fax machine in their homes. The question is why. To
Speaker 1: understand it helps to know a bit about the fact
Speaker 1: similar machines place in history. Although the technology had been
Speaker 1: around for decades, it wasn't until the nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: New York World's Fair that fax machines first seized mainstream
Speaker 1: recognition in the United States. There, attendees stood slack jawed
Speaker 1: in amazement as they viewed images and text arriving from
Speaker 1: around the world. At eighteen sheets per minute, the machines
Speaker 1: were simply too expensive for everyday use, though even by
Speaker 1: two one standalone fax machines sold for a whopping twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, far too pricey even for most businesses, much
Speaker 1: less individual consumers. It wasn't until later in the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties that the cost of the machines dropped to a
Speaker 1: point that businesses and home offices found them useful, notably
Speaker 1: for documents that required legal signatures. Copied signatures, as you
Speaker 1: can probably guess, were a source of controversy for years,
Speaker 1: as legal professionals argued about the validity of documents that
Speaker 1: arrived via phone lines. However, as court after court confirmed
Speaker 1: the validity of faxed signatures, doctors, lawyers, financial gurus, and
Speaker 1: other professionals begin to rely on faxes to transmit paperwork
Speaker 1: all over the place, thus entrenched in the workflow and
Speaker 1: minds of countless millions of people. The late nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: saw a dramatic rise in the number of fax machines.
Speaker 1: America had only around three hundred thousand of the contraptions
Speaker 1: in the middle of the eighties. By nine there were
Speaker 1: more than four million the fax machines. Heyday was at hand.
Speaker 1: They even featured prominently in pop culture. The nine sci
Speaker 1: fi comedy Back to the Future Part two explores a
Speaker 1: future where the McFly family had a fax machine in
Speaker 1: every room. So the faxing process is one that billions
Speaker 1: of people have ingrained into their consciousness. A place assigned
Speaker 1: document in the machine, punch in the destination phone number,
Speaker 1: hit the green button, and minutes later your paperwork is
Speaker 1: in the hands of a colleague on the other side
Speaker 1: of town or on the other side of the world.
Speaker 1: Assuming that the fax machine has paper, the cartridge is
Speaker 1: not out of ink, and nothing has gotten stuck in
Speaker 1: the transmission process. But in the mid nineteen nineties, another
Speaker 1: history anging technology exploded in use the Internet, which provided
Speaker 1: people with ways to instantly send text, pictures, and documents
Speaker 1: without the use of paper. With the coming of widespread email,
Speaker 1: it seemed that fax machines were doomed. Only they weren't.
Speaker 1: In a study from market intelligence firm I d C
Speaker 1: showed that the four major industries that are still using
Speaker 1: faxes UH those industries being manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and government,
Speaker 1: all predicted increased use of faxing over the next two years,
Speaker 1: averaging a increase. So why is that faxing is a
Speaker 1: familiar technology that people trust. The Complexities of the Internet
Speaker 1: and its many offshoot technologies, along with endless headlines about
Speaker 1: hackerspyware viruses, and data breaches, create in many people's minds
Speaker 1: a sense that the Web just isn't secure. In addition,
Speaker 1: government policies still encourage faxes, and legal processes like discovery
Speaker 1: of evidence lean heavily on paper documents, and doctors facs
Speaker 1: prescriptions and privacy documents and patient records. Fax machines are
Speaker 1: a habit, and it's a habit that dies hard because
Speaker 1: it's a simple, low tech, interoperable system that anyone can
Speaker 1: use with just a few minutes of training. Also, fax machines,
Speaker 1: like the aforementioned roaches, are evolving with the times. The
Speaker 1: people surveyed by I d C said that the biggest
Speaker 1: reason for the increase in faxing was that faxing was
Speaker 1: now integrated with email as digital faxing, and so was
Speaker 1: easier to use. We spoke via email. Todd Johnson, a
Speaker 1: doctor at Access Family Medicine in Lincoln, Nebraska. He said,
Speaker 1: I fax office notes, prescriptions, lab data orders and consultation requests,
Speaker 1: all facts, anything else that's requested. I would email just
Speaker 1: as easily, but I don't have a general email account
Speaker 1: to send the requested information to. Typically, usually I'm only
Speaker 1: provided with a fax number to return the requested information.
Speaker 1: Johnson says that the newest generation of digital faxing makes
Speaker 1: his workflow fairly easy. A quote. I don't use a
Speaker 1: feed and fax paper machine. I can facts from any
Speaker 1: of my computers, tablet, or smartphone. I use them because
Speaker 1: I'm requested to use them by other facilities. They're easy
Speaker 1: to use, and now electronically configured into my phone system.
Speaker 1: I just drag and drop a PDF into the fax
Speaker 1: portal and away it goes. If that sounds too good
Speaker 1: to be true, Never fear there's still one old school
Speaker 1: faxing bugaboo at hand busy signals, Johnson said, Sometimes, but rarely,
Speaker 1: there is a busy signal. However, my system will re
Speaker 1: send a failed facts or if it encounters a busy signal.
Speaker 1: In spite of the intermittent hiccups and faxing, the machines
Speaker 1: are likely to live on for decades. They're comfortable, cheap, convenient,
Speaker 1: and generally reliable. They're accepted around the world in ways
Speaker 1: that digital signatures sometimes aren't. So until digital alternatives find
Speaker 1: the same kind of universal recognition, you can expect that
Speaker 1: fax machines will still be here, beeping and worrying long
Speaker 1: after our individual messaging processes have ceased. Today's episode was
Speaker 1: written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and for
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