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Fax Machines, Industry Sector ELECTRONICS

Product & Market Data for Fax Machines

Initial Investment	36,361,620$
Competitors	1
Licence Rating	1.40
Carbon Footprint CO2 / Sales M$	335 tons
CO2 Allowance / Sales M$	350 tons
Current Market Price	490.00$
Product Category	Consumer
Initial Capacity (Units)	7430
Current Production Capacity	7430
Total Sales	0$

Ranking of Companies producing Fax Machines
Rank	Company	Last Turn	Size	Sales	Price	Stock
1	CapS FaxMachine	2010-07-27 02:41:59	1x	0M$	490.00$	0

Materials required for Fax Machines Production (Demand at 1x Capacity, Cost per unit Fax Machines)
27410 Electronic Parts 56.81$	201 Plastics 47.25$	5721 S Electric Motors 23.72$	2006 Microchips 22.3$	1040 Electricity 12.54$	1115 Silver 7.56$	13 Electrical Cable 6.74$
13 Steel Goods 5.83$	1189 Solder 5.82$	8916 Water 5.04$	30 Glass 3.02$

Product Trivia

FAX MACHINES

HISTORY

Facsimile transmission over wires or faxing was invented by Alexander Bain, a Scottish mechanic who in 1843 received a British patent for �improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs.� Seven years earlier, Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and the fax machine evolved from the telegraph technology.

Alexander Bain had created a fax machine transmitter that was designed to scan a flat surface (made of metal) using a stylus mounted on a pendulum and the stylus picked up the images on the surface. An amateur clock maker, Alexander Bain adapted parts from clock mechanisms combined with telegraph technology to invent his fax machine.

Frederick Bakewell developed a (facimile) system with tin-foil covered revolving drums for transmitting and receiving recorded pictures. Bakewell, an English physicist, was the first actually to demonstrate facsimile transmission. The demonstration took place in 1851 at the World's Fair in London. Bakewell's system differed somewhat from Bain's in that images were transmitted and received on cylinders, a method that was widely practiced through the 1960s. At the transmitter, the image to be scanned was written with varnish or some other non-conducting material on tinfoil, wrapped around the transmitter cylinder, and then scanned by a conductive stylus that, like Bain's stylus, was mounted to a pendulum. The cylinder rotated at a uniform rate by means of a clock mechanism. At the receiver, a similar pendulum-driven stylus marked chemically treated paper with an electric current as the receiving cylinder rotated.

Frederick Bakewell's shellac conducting roller

In 1865 Italian physics professor Giovanni Caselli established the first commercial fax system, which linked Paris and several other French cities, using a device called a Pant�l�graphe which was a modification of Alexander Bain's original idea. He transmitted nearly 5,000 faxes in the first year.

Made of cast iron and standing more than 2m high, this primitive but effective machine worked as follows. The sender wrote a message on a sheet of tin in non-conducting ink. The sheet was then fixed to a curved metal plate and scanned by a needle, three lines to the millimetre. The signals were carried by telegraph to the marked out the message in Prussian blue ink, the colour produced by a chemical reaction, as the paper was soaked in potassium ferro-cyanide. To ensure that both needles scanned at exactly the same rate, two extremely accurate clocks were used to trigger a pendulum which, in turn, was linked to gears and pulleys that controlled the needles.

The Gray National Telautograph Company originated in 1888 when the company bought the patent for the first Telautograph instrument from Omnifax founding father, Professor Elisha Gray. According to the patent, the invention enabled �one to transmit his own handwriting to a distant point over a two-wire circuit". Gray had received much notoriety two years earlier for being just three hours late in filing his patent for the invention of the telephone. Grays's Telautograph was the first facsimile that wrote on stationery paper. This transmission to the Police in 1893 was the first public exhibition of the Telautograph. This �Standard� model also drew record crowds at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. In 1894 George Tiffany designed the faster �Eureka" model which gained national prominence in 1895 when the editors of the Chicago News-Record witnessed the simultaneous reproduction of the handwriting of delegates at a Republican convention over 431 miles away in Cleveland.

The Telediagraph was one of several early fax-like devices sending pictures via telegraph lines. It was invented around 1895 by Ernest A. Hummel, a watchmaker from St. Paul, Minnesota.

The first machines were installed in the office of the New York Herald in 1898. By 1899, Hummel had improved the machine and the newspaper had machines in the offices of the Chicago Times Herald, the St. Louis Republic, the Boston Herald, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The system used synchronised rotating 8-inch drums, with a platinum stylus as an electrode in the transmitter. The original image was drawn on 8"x6" tin-foil using a non-conducting ink made from shellac mixed with alcohol. The image was received on carbon paper wrapped between two sheets of blank paper. When the electrode touched the tin-foil in the transmitter the circuit was closed; when it touched the shellac the circuit was open.

The signal controlled a moving stylus in the receiver, making it touch or move back from the paper. At the end of each rotation a synchronising signal was sent, and the styluses in both machines moved 1/56" to the left before scanning the next line.

The first picture sent was "an accurate picture of the first gun fired at Manila." The machine took 20-30 minutes to send the picture.

Near-copies of this and similar mechanisms were in use until the 1970s, although transmission speeds were improved and photocells allowed plain paper originals and photographs to be transmitted. The basic principle was also applied to stencil-cutting machines for ink duplicators.

In 1902, Prof. Dr. Arthur Korn developed a photoelectric scanning system for the transmission and reproduction of photography, and in 1907, he established a commercial picture transmission system. This system eventually linked Berlin, London and Paris and became the world�s first facsimile network. It employed the light-sensitive element selenium to convert the different tones of a scanned image into a varying electric current. This enabled 'halftone' illustrations to be transmitted for the first time. Commercial use of Korn's system began in Germany five years later.

Facsimile then made slow but steady progress through the �20s and �30s, and in 1934 the Associated Press introduced a wire photo service. Korn�s breakthrough of giving the fax machine �sight� prompted serious commercial experimentation by three American telecommunications giants: AT&T, RCA and Western Union. Korn�s success and achievement in using the fax brought new development and direction for broadcast publishing.

By the 1920s pictures for publication in newspapers were being transmitted around the world. Later developments of the service in the 1930's included the introduction of weather maps and wire photo services. Technology had improved beyond the late 19th century equipment to ensure that facsimile was a technically viable proposition even though the basic techniques and concept were unchanged.

The main area in which facsimile proved successful in augmenting telegraph facilities was in the transmission of photographs i.e. phototelegrams - mainly newspaper pictures, but also pictures of documents, machine drawings and fingerprints. This service grew from the start of the New York - London link in 1926 and continued to thrive. By 1950 access to 24 countries was available and in 1963 the Post Office phototelegraphic system was operating services to and from 56 European terminals and 38 extra-European terminals.

The success of phototelegraphy was not reflected in other uses devised for facsimile. Attempts to introduce home news broadcasts in manuscript form and thus bring facsimile into the residential market failed. Such systems were tried as early as 1929 in America and throughout the 1930s. Once television was introduced there was no possibility of facsimile competing.

As a telecommunications medium facsimile remained from the 1930's to the early 1960's essentially a system for specialised applications with sophisticated expensive machines - the two main sections of use being in distributing weather charts and in the newspaper industry.

Although suitable telephone coupling devices were available from the 1930s it was not until the 1960s that relatively cheap facsimile machines were available for connection to the PSTN. Growth in the market was prompted by declining postal services in the USA, and in Japan by the pictorial nature of the alphabet. These new machines became known as document facsimile machines and were used for transmitting handwritten, typed or printed text and drawings. A contributory factor to the late development of a simple dial-up facsimile unit was the relatively late stage at which solid state techniques were introduced to the facsimile system.

Europe lagged behind the USA and Japan, but early growth followed agreed standards on machine design by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT). The introduction of Group 1 standard in 1968 was a significant step in the development of facsimile, despite slow and unreliable terminals and lack of full compatibility. It took 6 minutes to transmit an A4 page, but the machine stimulated interest in the concept of sending text and graphic material by telephone around the world instead of heavy reliance on the postal service.

A Group 2 standard was agreed in 1976, which halved the time of transmission to 3 minutes and improved quality with a scanning density of 100 lines per inch. But the density remained unsatisfactory for sending documents containing small print and the time for transmission still meant that a 10 page document took half an hour to receive.

A further CCITT standard was agreed in 1980 for Group 3 machines, which used digital transmission techniques and took less than one minute per page with an improved scanning resolution of 200 lines per inch. All were compatible and could communicate with most Group 2 machines regardless of supplier. (There is a new protocol called Group 4, but it requires ISDN lines.)

What transformed the fax was the advent of printers that produced pictures without messing processing or delay. Manufacturers could now transform the fax machine into a convenient piece of office, and later consumer, electronics. By 1980 the bulk had been reduced to the size of a laser printer but use of the fax was still limited.

In Britain, the turning point came with a number of lengthy postal strikes - suddenly a broader application for fax machines was clear.

In the early 1990s Amstrad, BT and other suppliers brought out compact models for small business and home use, still relying on rolls of coated paper. When the thermal system was replaced by inkjet machines, printing onto plain A4 paper the user-friendly fax machine finally arrived.

In the 1990s computers were often used to send faxes using a scanner and a fax modem. However by the 21st Century faxing was being superceded by email.

HOW A FAX MACHINE WORKS

A modern fax machine does not have the rotating drums and is a lot faster than the early machines, but it uses the same basic mechanics to get the job done:

At the sending end, there is some sort of sensor to read the paper. Usually, a modern fax machine also has a paper-feed mechanism so that it is easy to send multi-page faxes.
There is some standard way to encode the white and black spots that the fax machine sees on the paper so that they can travel through a phone line.
At the receiving end, there is a mechanism that marks the paper with black dots.

A typical fax machine that you find in an office is officially known as a CCITT (ITU-T) Group 3 Facsimile machine. The Group 3 designation tells you four things about the fax machine:

It will be able to communicate with any other Group 3 machine.
It has a horizontal resolution of 203 pixels per inch (8 pixels/mm).
It has three different vertical resolutions:
- Standard: 98 lines per inch (3.85 lines/mm)
- Fine: 196 lines per inch (7.7 lines/mm)
- Super fine (not officially a Group 3 standard, but fairly common): 391 lines per inch (15.4 lines/mm)
It can transmit at a maximum data rate of 14,400 bits per second (bps), and will usually fall back to 12,000 bps, 9,600 bps, 7,200 bps, 4,800 bps or 2,400 bps if there is a lot of noise on the line.

The fax machine typically has a CCD or photo-diode sensing array. It contains 1,728 sensors (203 pixels per inch), so it can scan an entire line of the document at one time. The paper is lit by a small fluorescent tube so that the sensor has a clear view.

The image sensor looks for black or white. Therefore, a single line of the document can be represented in 1,728 bits. In standard mode, there are 1,145 lines to the document. The total document size is 1,728 pixels per line * 1,145 lines = approximately 2,000,000 bits of information

To reduce the number of bits that have to be transmitted, Group 3 fax machines use three different compression techniques. See Electronics Plus: Facsimile Theory for a discussion of these compression types. The basic idea in these schemes is to look for "runs" of same-colour bits. For example, if a line on the page is all white, the modem can transmit a dozen or so bits rather than the full 1,728 bits scanned for the line. This sort of compression can cut transmission time by a factor of at least two, and for many documents much more. A document containing a significant amount of white space can transmit in just a few seconds.

The bits for the scanned document travel through the phone line and arrive at a receiving fax machine. The bits are decoded, uncompressed and reassembled into the scanned lines of the original document. There are five common ways to print the fax, depending on the type of machine that receives it:

Thermal paper - When fax machines started infiltrating offices en mass in the 1980s, most of them used thermal paper. The paper is coated with chemicals that react to heat by turning black.
Thermal film - Thermal film uses a page-width ribbon that contains ink that melts onto paper when heated. This is more complicated mechanically than thermal paper but less complicated than an inkjet.
Inkjet - This technique uses the same mechanism as an inkjet printer.
Laser printer - This technique uses the same mechanism as a laser printer.
Computer printer - The fax is actually received by a fax modem (a modem that understands the Group 3 data standards), stored on the computer's hard disk as a graphics file and then sent to the computer's usual printer.

Explode a fax machine here

Crazy Facts Corner

It took 6 minutes to send a single page via fax in 1924. (Group I fax machines)
It took 3 minutes to send a page via fax in 1974. (Group II fax machines)
It took 1 minute to send a page via fax in 1980. (Group III fax machines)
A page can be sent via fax today in 6 seconds (Group III fax machine at 14.4Kbps) or 1.7 seconds (Group III fax machine at 33.6Kbps)
Magnavox manufactured and Xerox marketed the first commercial fax machine in 1966.
No fax machines are manufactured in the United States today. Most are manufactured in Japan, Korea and China.
Fax machines could not be connected to public telephone lines in USA until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled they could be.
There were only about 30,000 fax machines in the United States in 1970. Today there are over 9 million.
A richly featured fax machine sold for as much as $20,000 in 1982. Today, a fax machine with many more features and using plain paper sells for under $1,000.