@coopersmithFaxedRiseFall2015
[!info] - Cite Key: @coopersmithFaxedRiseFall2015 - Link: Coopersmith - 2015 - Faxed the rise and fall of the fax machine.pdf - Abstract: Description based on print version record. - Bibliography: Coopersmith, J. 2015. Faxed: the rise and fall of the fax machine. Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. - Tags: #Electronic-books, #Facsimile-transmission, #Fax-machines, #History, #Technological-innovations
Annotations¶
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Imported on 2023-03-07 1:44 pm¶
Questions / confusion¶
[!quote|#ffd400] Highlight Frederick Bakewell
probably very relevant name.
Page 1 [[2023-03-04#2:34 pm]]
Definitions / concepts¶
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight facsimile—
an exact copy, especially of written or printed material.
Page 1 [[2023-03-04#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight selenium photoelectric cell
Page 2 [[2023-03-04#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In Bain’s 1843 “improvement for taking copies of surfaces,” the transmitting and receiving plates consisted of a metal frame filled with short, insulated wires bound together with sealing wax and ground smooth. The message on the transmitting plate was made of printers’ type. A pendulum moved a stylus back and forth across each plate. The end of each swing activated clockwork to drop the frame so that the next swing scanned a new line
Bain's original idea.
Page 6 [[2023-03-05#11:29 am]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In 1846–48, he built a new fax machine with a cylinder replacing the flat plate. Instead of raised type, the sender wrote a message with a non-conducting ink on tin foil or paper coated with Dutch metal (a thin leaf of brass). Weights unwinding by clockwork synchronized the pendulums and moved the stylus gradually across the rotating cylinder.
Improvements,
Page 6 [[2023-03-05#11:30 am]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight Bakewell also employed a rotating cylinder instead of a flat plate and non-conducting ink on a thin sheet of tin foil. The sender wrote his message on a varnish-coated piece of tin foil with an ink containing caustic soda, then wiped the foil with a wet sponge. The foil was wrapped around a six-inch-diameter cylinder, and a stylus scanned the message as the cylinder rotated. Where the soda had removed the varnish, the stylus touched the actual foil, making a circuit.
Bakewell's patent. It's synchronization was more user friendly ( a reoccuring topic) which made it loved.
Page 6 [[2023-03-05#11:32 am]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In his 1863 novel about the twentieth century, Jules Verne credited “Professor Giovanni Caselli of Florence” with developing the fax machine. Verne, always attuned to current technological developments, was well informed: Abbe Giovanni Caselli had not only faxed images from Paris to Lyon but had created the first fax machine to enter regular service, transmitting thousands of images before the service stopped in 1867
First practical use of a fax machine.
Page 9 [[2023-03-05#11:51 am]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight A lantern projected the image onto a small brass box which enclosed the selenium cell. A platinum-covered brass spindle moved the box so that its pinhole passed over the entire projected image.
Page 21 [[2023-03-05#4:32 pm]]
Relevant / important¶
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight virtues of accurate, authentic, and errorless transmission remained constant
the hope of the technology
Page 1 [[2023-03-04#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight To send a fax, the message had to be prepared, scanned, converted to electrical impulses, transmitted to the receiving machine, and then reconverted to impulses and reproduced
steps to faxing
Page 2 [[2023-03-04#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight In January 1830, he walked 19 kilometers to attend a lecture on “the electric fluid.” His interest sparked, he began experimenting with electricity and, disgracing his family, broke his apprenticeship to go south to Edinburgh.
What created his curiosity
Page 4 [[2023-03-05#11:12 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Along with navy Lieutenant Thomas Wright, Bain received patents in 1840 and 1841 for applying electricity to clocks, signals, printing and railroads.
Some of Bains accomplishments.
Page 4 [[2023-03-05#11:16 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Bain’s major successful invention was the 1846 automatic chemical telegraph, which used chemically treated paper to receive messages.12 So widespread was this paper that an electrical journal in 1885 could refer to “ordinary Bain paper” without defining it.
What Bain is known for
Page 5 [[2023-03-05#11:18 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Bain and Bakewell exchanged heated public letters in technical journals and the London Times, accusing each other of theft of intellectual property, dishonesty, incompetence, and betrayals of trust.
Rivalry
Page 7 [[2023-03-05#11:32 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Bakewell claimed his system offered “authentication of telegraphic correspondence by the signatures of the writers, freedom from the errors of transmission, and the maintenance of secrecy.”
The ability to send messages with any code the sender wants, instead of having to use the code everyone knew which was very insecure and easy to intercept. If you send literally any image you want you are able to send your own ciphers which were much less likely to be intercepted because only the people on both ends knew the code.
Page 9 [[2023-03-05#11:45 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The challenge was not to send a facsimile telegram; the challenge was to send a facsimile telegram comparatively more easily, less expensively, or in some other way that was superior to the established methods of telegraphy
It had to be so well optimized that it has to be practical to use, something that everyone can use easily.
Page 9 [[2023-03-05#11:50 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Not until April 16, 1865, did service officially begin between Paris and Lyon, with service between Paris and Havre added two weeks later.
Page 13 [[2023-03-05#12:14 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight He never quite overcame the technical challenges of synchronization, inductance, and reverse polarization
Page 14 [[2023-03-05#12:17 pm]]
Digital Signatures in the telegraph
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight [it] is susceptible of great improvements and may eventually be of important service
Page 18 [[2023-03-05#3:47 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Sending photographs at the same speed as articles promised to radically alter the role of photography in newspapers
Changing how we consume the media.
Page 20 [[2023-03-05#4:27 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight “Visionary Telegraphy” represented “a branch of non-practical electricity” in which “no real progress has been made, and in my opinion it is very doubtful whether any practical progress ever will be made.
Alluding to the Television.
Page 21 [[2023-03-05#4:33 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight vacuum tubes
Page 21 [[2023-03-05#4:33 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Belgian engineer H. Carbonelle’s 1905 patent for a machine that provided three scanning options: a non-conductive ink on metal foil, the differences in a gelatin’s thickness, or the differences in electrical resistance of the metallic salts on a photographic plate or film.
Page 21 [[2023-03-05#4:52 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Most praised was his ingenious solution to selenium’s inertia. Installing a second smaller selenium cell in the transmitter circuit compensated for the main cell’s inertia. Korn’s mathematical training proved invaluable in determining the optimum balance between the two selenium cells, which reduced the transmission time for a small photo from 42 minutes in 1904 to 12 minutes in 1906
Page 22 [[2023-03-05#4:59 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight His most crucial innovations were altering the thickness of the relief for easier scanning and using a large microphone to capture those variations. These modifications were as much art as science, the results of repeated experiments done with painstaking attention to detail.
Page 27 [[2023-03-05#5:06 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Early equipment remained simply too crude and indiscriminate to send and receive images, the equivalent of sculpting ivory with a jackhammer. Even demonstrating the concept stretched the limits of radio equipment.
Page 27 [[2023-03-05#5:07 pm]]
Agree¶
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight This simple explanation hides the myriads of technical, economic, and legal challenges that inventors, craftsmen, and promoters had to recognize, understand, and solve in translating a promising idea into a commercially viable reality
They are trying to make it sound good so that people buy into it.
Page 2 [[2023-03-04#2:35 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Transmitting faced major challenges of synchronization and circuit quality.
Page 2 [[2023-03-04#2:36 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight but achieving uniform motion proved very difficult.
had a host of problems creating it.
Page 2 [[2023-03-04#2:36 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight by lines too close together often garbled transmissions, causing “mistakes, repetitions, general confusion, and consequent delay.
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:37 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Charles Wheatstone
The guy who helped invent the telegraph
Page 4 [[2023-03-05#11:10 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight London was the center of research and applications for the rapidly expanding field of telegraphy
back to the idea of Britain having the head start which led to a bigger advantage because people wanted to be with the best, furthering the gap.
Page 4 [[2023-03-05#11:13 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In a decision that had less to do with justice than business, O’Rielly agreed to use only Morse’s system in 1852, freezing Bain out of the American market.
Interesting, when O'Rielly realized that they had no more use for Bain they decided to throw him out.
Page 5 [[2023-03-05#11:24 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Eight years later, he traveled again to the United States for further patent battles with Morse that bankrupted him
Trying to hopelessly fight a grudge.
Page 5 [[2023-03-05#11:25 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Bain’s failures were threefold: ideas in advance of the enabling technologies of the time, being “not a commercial man,”17 and personal shortcomings
Whenever you invent new technology it seems you always have to have the economics about it in the back of your head, even if its a fantastic device that is life changing if no one can make money off of it then its as good as dust.
Page 5 [[2023-03-05#11:26 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight For Bain, the priority was his electrochemical telegraph. Unlike facsimile, it proved technically practical and even financially profitable, but its promotion and application demanded Bain’s presence abroad.
Bain's and bakewell's machines are like the opposite of each other. Bakewell was elegant and performed great while Bain's was practical, got the job done and financially practical.
Page 8 [[2023-03-05#11:39 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The Morse system benefitted not only from economies of scale in manufacturing thousands of its inexpensive sounders but also from the training of operators and users. These lower costs as well as institutional inertia benefitted telegraphy as careers and companies increasingly evolved around dots and dashes instead of images.
The real reason Morse's system was so good. It was cheap so an average person was able to afford it, it was very simple to learn and use you just had to remember the code for each letter in the alphabet. This led to it being the preferred method, as while Bain's could transmit more data people did not have a use to transmit all that. They wanted a cheap way to communicate with people from far away.
Page 8 [[2023-03-05#11:42 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Faxing offered 100-percent accuracy and the authority of the original—a major attraction for telegraphers Coopersmith, Jonathan. Faxed : The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3318872. Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2023-03-04 19:21:55. Copyright © 2015. Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved
Page 8 [[2023-03-05#11:43 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Thomas Edison promised his system would equal Morse’s in speed; transmit “outline Photographs” and any language
Here is a very very big point, "ant language," The shortcoming of morse is that it only works well with latin languages. Think about how crazy it would be to create a set of dots and dashes for each of the thousands of characters in the chinese alphabet.
Page 9 [[2023-03-05#11:50 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The five circuits, not to mention the time needed to prepare the type, meant Bonelli’s system was simply uneconomical
Back to the idea that a technology has to be economical, even if it works well to be adopted.
Page 10 [[2023-03-05#11:53 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight the picture was considerably interrupted by messages traveling the same course, and had dots and dashes all over it, but was nevertheless recognizable
For the time it is important to be "good enough" people wanted a way to send stuff that even though it may not be perfect if the person at the other end understood what was sent the machine did its job.
Page 12 [[2023-03-05#12:16 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In “one of the most original and ingenious parts” of his system, Caselli reversed the polarity of the current so the main circuit remained closed until the stylus touched the ink. Then the opposing current of the auxiliary batteries immediately stopped the line transmission.56 The benefits were twofold: sharper lines and a more aesthetically pleasing arrangement of dark lines on a white background.
Big advantage to his system.
Page 14 [[2023-03-05#12:18 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Practical problems doomed the world’s first commercial fax service. Contemporary and later observers like Thomas Edison and William Sawyer considered its synchronization the system’s “great defect.” Poor synchronization often blurred messages, sometimes to the point of illegibility.
The inconsistency of the technology would be a huge turnoff. Since its synchronization was not reliable customer would be hesitant to spend the not insignificant amount of cash for the hope that it works properly. I knew that if a kind of inconsistent technology was around today I would certainly not use it.
Page 15 [[2023-03-05#2:59 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Morse sounder had enormous advantages of easier use, much lower cost, less interference in transmission, and an already-developed infrastructure as well as users who had by now incorporated the standard telegram into their business routines.
Dont fix whats not broken. The competition is already meeting everyones needs so unless its something big (like the telephone with voice) then it will not dethrone the telegraph.
Page 15 [[2023-03-05#3:42 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Synchronization depended on two conical pendulums, a flywheel at the receiver, and a relay that needed the combined current of the main batteries at both ends. This left synchronization overly dependent on the variable quality of the telegraph line.
At least it was not on the machine this time. Still an improvement.
Page 16 [[2023-03-05#3:46 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The pantelegraph itself did not have a future, but its principles and experience did
Important. Just because one thing does not work out, it does not mean that the stuff learned cannot be transferred to other ideas. This is why its good to try something out even if the outcome is uncertain, you will not know if it will important later or not.
Page 18 [[2023-03-05#3:49 pm]]
Emergence of the modern Newspaper
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Responding to the transmission challenge, Korn reverted to a scanner based on Bakewell’s concept of a stylus tracing insulating ink on a metal plate. The current of 10–20 milliamperes, an order of magnitude more than his selenium system, enabled reliable long-distance transmission.
Now that the technology has a use case, a need it is now able to evolve into something much bigger.
Page 26 [[2023-03-07#1:42 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight And finally, facsimile’s failure highlighted the technological and economic challenges of sending images reliably over long distances
Page 28 [[2023-03-05#5:08 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Looking backward in 1914 revealed seven decades of failed efforts to develop and commercialize facsimile. As much as that technology had advanced, conventional telegraphy had advanced even further, solidifying its grip on rapid printed communications. Users and telegraph companies had developed ways to send telegrams securely despite the lack of an exact reproduction of the original message. Korn’s photocell-based machine opened the market of photographs for newspapers and magazines, but the high cost, slow speed, and low resolution deterred successful use. Fax seemed a failed technology, a tempting idea that attracted many inventors but found few users
Page 28 [[2023-03-05#5:08 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Looking forward, however, a new generation of inventors equipped with new technologies saw renewed opportunities in newspapers and messages. A few tentative successes had occurred, but major technological and economic obstacles still faced developers. World War I would change that situation dramatically by forcibly accelerating the development of electronics, setting the stage for the first large-scale and sustained applications of facsimile.
Page 28 [[2023-03-05#5:09 pm]]
Interesting but not relevant¶
[!quote|#e56eee] Highlight Despite problems of preparation and a short life of a few days or weeks, paper soaked in an electrochemical solution best turned the weak received signal into an image comparable to those produced with pens, pencils, and other means of recording.
It was very bad that it was unable to compare to just using a paper and pencil
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:37 pm]]
[!quote|#e56eee] Highlight that is, its cost, the expense of working and maintenance, its speed, correctness, and freedom from derangement.”
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:38 pm]]
Interesting but not relevant¶
[!quote|#f19837] Highlight Alexander Bain
Hes probably important
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:39 pm]]
[!quote|#f19837] Highlight Alexander Bain’s life exemplified the best and worst of rapidly industrializing Britain in the early nineteenth century. Poor and unschooled, he educated himself, learning about electricity from public lectures. Caught in the murky nexus of patent priority between research and commercial exploitation, Bain received large amounts of money but lost it in unsuccessful litigation and died a pauper
A little bit of his early attempts
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:39 pm]]
[!quote|#f19837] Highlight Bain employed chemically treated paper as the receiver, first for his fax machine and later for the far more successful chemical telegraph
He is probably ahead of his time
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:40 pm]]
[!quote|#f19837] Highlight Richard H. Ranger noted in 1926, Bain was “so basically correct that . . . generally, we are all following in his footsteps.
Confirms it
Page 3 [[2023-03-04#2:40 pm]]
Interesting but not relevant¶
[!quote|#aaaaaa] Highlight selenium and newspapers
Page 19 [[2023-03-05#3:53 pm]]
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