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Facsimile ("fax") machines be- came popular in the 1980s and they remain an important part of business and personal communications. They scan printed information and electronically send it to another fax machine. The first patent for one was granted over 160 years ago in 1843. It went to Alexander Bain of Scotland.

Bain was born in 1811 near Thurso, as far north in Scotland as modern trains travel. He was raised on a desolate farm with his twin sister and 12 other siblings. Bain was not a particularly good student, nor was he good at farming. But while thinking about his future, he chanced to attend a lecture on electricity and science. He became fascinated by technology and asked his father to apprentice him to a local clockmaker.

When his apprenticeship ended, Bain moved to Edinburgh and then on to London in 1837. He worked as a journeyman clockmaker and attended public lectures on electricity in his spare time. He used his mechanical skill and newly learned knowledge to construct the first electric clock and took out a patent on it in 1841. Bain's clock used electromagnets to keep a pendulum swinging. That invention turned out to be particularly important for railway timetables.

Bain developed an electrical method to connect his clocks and force them all to keep the same time. Those clocks' first use was on a rail line between Edinburgh and Glasgow. They operated so well that railways expanded the use of Bain's system to other lines.

Bain's work with electricity and information transfer then led him to experiment with the idea of a fax machine. His first fax method synchro- nized the movement of two pendulums to scan a document. In its simplest form, the pendulums swung in exact synchro- nization. The text to be scanned was thin metal letters. A swinging pendulum at the transmitter had a tip with a small metal brush. It sent an electrical pulse when the brush contacted the metal letters. The receiving pendulum also had a metal brush tip and swung over chemically treated paper. The electrical pulse caused the paper to darken in the particular spots where the brush touched it. Bain received a British patent for it in 1843.

Bain worked on a more compact fax design in 1850 that used a rotating drum instead of a pendulum. But as with his pendulum design, Bain never got it to work in a practical setting. Bain had problems synchronizing the transmitter and receiver, but he is credited with the idea of scanning small bits of an image to allow for transmitting it in pulses. Bain had to leave it to others to develop a workable fax system.

His next project involved developing a high-speed telegraph or ticker tape. Ordinary telegraphs operated at about 40 words per minute. Bain developed a system that used punched holes on a long, narrow strip of input paper. Feeding the paper into a high-speed reader caused electrical pulses to be sent along a wire. Those pulses were converted to readable words on chemically treated paper strips at the receiving end. In one demonstration in 1846, Bain's chemical telegraph transmitted 282 words in 52 seconds. He received an American patent for it in 1849.

Bain raised two children as a widower. He earned a considerable amount of money from his inventions, but other inventors were working on similar projects and Bain spent a great deal defending his work in court. He also made poor investment choices, which resulted in the loss of almost all his money. The British government awarded him a small pension before he died in 1877.

The first public demonstration of a practical fax machine was in 1851. The first commercial fax service was between Paris and Lyon, and opened in 1865. Both systems were based on Bain's patents.

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