FAXED: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine by Jonathan Coopersmith (review)

Few technologies had as long a gestation as the fax machine, which as historian Jonathan Coopersmith (Texas A&M) chronicles in his contribution to the Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology series, was more than 150 years in the making. Indeed, the same transatlantic community of inventors responsible for the principle breakthroughs in telegraphy devoted considerable time to developing facsimile, a pattern that repeated itself decades later with the primary figures behind television. Again and again, though, the market imagined for instantaneous document transmission never really materialized. The authenticity and accuracy promised by fax were always more appealing in theory than practice and other options—telegraphy, airmail, and teletype—proved themselves cheaper, sturdier, easier to use, and more interconnected.

When the general office market finally did arrive, thanks in large part to the Japanese-led establishment of the highly compatible G3 standard in 1977, techno-visionaries all but announced facsimile dead on arrival—an anachronistic obstacle to the paperless office. Yet the fax machine flourished alongside the personal computer in the 1980s and 1990s, only slowly seeing its functions picked off by internet-based applications in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That story and the ways that facsimile nestled its way into a number of niche markets—the news business, military meteorology, retail banking, and others—during the fax machine’s seasons in the wilderness are the subjects of Faxed.

Based on an immense body of material collected from archives across three continents, Faxed provides a model of transnational scholarship and represents a major addition to the histories of communication and information technology. Across the book’s six chapters, Coopersmith brings a number of analytical frameworks to bear on facsimile technology, covering its institutional and technical development, its adoption by users, and the cultural meanings constructed around the technology. As Coopersmith shows, the fax machine was a technology always on the verge. In this way, it provides a window into the workings of the cultural imperative. For well over a century, “an evolving group of enthusiasts and advocates” (p. 4) essentially knew what facsimile could do, how it could work, and remained convinced of its desirability. Yet until the second half of the twentieth century, that technical knowledge never really translated into a viable market. Technological push, as Coopersmith argues, always outstripped market pull.

In many ways, facsimile developed along two tracks: the first, a stymied vision of facsimile as document transmission; the second, a more marketable vision of facsimile as pictorial telegraph. The latter, as Coopersmith shows, first found a home in businesses and government agencies where images, such as photographs, weather maps, engineering drawings, and personal signatures, were key to work flows or constituted a potentially valuable commodity. The most important of these markets was newspaper publishing, where facsimile provided the technological basis for services like wirephoto. The news business was essentially the first institutional sponsor facsimile found, greatly magnifying its impact on public life. Fewer “than a thousand transmitters and receivers existed in 1940” (p. 71), Coopersmith notes, but they provided the infrastructural backbone for transmitting photographs viewed by millions of readers each day. Less successful were attempts to broadcast faxpapers direct to homes in the 1930s and 1940s, which never attracted enough subscribers to go much beyond the experimental level.

Coopersmith’s treatment of the news business should make Faxed required reading for media historians and it is in these middle chapters where the book really hits its stride. Also in this section, Faxed provides a much-needed account of how new communication technologies, such as teletype and desktop telegraphs (based on fax technology), fit into the information flows of the mid-twentieth-century office, in some ways picking up chronologically where JoAnne Yates’s 1989 Control through Communication left off.

In its latter chapters, Faxed provides a well-rounded account of faxing’s centrality to 1980s and 1990s corporate culture. Coopersmith also follows the fax machine outside the...