Fax was based on the idea of transmitting written material or an image through a wire, like conveying characters by telegraph or voice through a telephone. In the 1990s, it became a commonly used technology among corporate and private users, particularly in Japan and the United States. Today, only two decades later, electronic transmission of PDFs and e-mails has replaced fax. Though this technology only attained a brief golden age, people across several countries worked hard for one and a half centuries to innovate, produce, sell, and maintain fax machines based upon diverse basic technology and varying transmission design.

The earliest recovered citing of fax dates from the 1840s and illustrates the technology’s relationship to the innovation of the electric telegraph and telephone. The first electrical telegraphs were built in the early 1800s. Samuel Morse built his telegraph in the 1830s, and it had substantial diffusion by the 1850s. Several inventors developed the telephone from the 1840s onward, and its diffusion began in the late nineteenth century. In contrast, the fax was developed for more than a century before its takeoff as a business in the 1990s.

Fax first emerged as a telegraph extension in Britain and France, and people in the United States and Germany had been developing its technical promise since the mid-nineteenth century. They struggled to find ways to transfer written messages into electrical waves and recreate them in the receiver. The technicians devised several complicated technical solutions, but fax promoters were not able to frame the technology in a way that attracted substantial demand. The people and companies advancing fax found it hard to compete with the price and speed of telegrams and, beginning in the interwar years, airmail letters. The military use of fax in the two world wars illustrates this. The military preferred mail and telegrams or teletypes.

From the interwar years to the 1960s, companies worked to apply the technical promise of fax and used the advances in radio transmission and the possibilities of electronic amplification-based radio tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits. Potent industrial innovators and producers like Siemens in Germany and AT&T in the United States developed picture transmission. This was used to circulate images to newspapers and distribute brief newspaper articles and weather maps to subscribers. However, fax remained a niche product and did not make substantial profit. After World War II, technical innovations and new electronic advances in the computer and telecommunication industries were made by many companies in the United States. Fax continued to be used to circulate images to subscribers, and transmission of documents became its largest application, especially in large businesses. However, the price remained high, scale low, and profit modest.

Beginning in the 1960s, telephone companies started gaining interest in fax as a telephone extension, which attracted many more users. However, until the late 1970s, diffusion of telephone fax machines was hampered by absence of standards between telephone companies and across borders. At the same time, fax technology was enhanced as the Xerox Corporation started introducing innovations and producing fax machines in the mid-1960s, but their machines were expensive and sales remained limited. The establishment of international fax standards and liberalization of telephone companies in the 1970s sparked a fax boom, first in Japan in the late 1980s and a little later in the United States. The fax market had many producers in Japan and the United States. However, by the year 2000, the fax began to succumb to e-mail, the Web, and PDFs.

Coopersmith’s volume discusses this complex history across the United States, Japan, and Europe during more than one and a half centuries in just 300 pages. The book is based on a handful of U.S. corporate archives, the Communication Industry Association of Japan’s annual forecasts, and the discourse on fax in a remarkable selection (mainly in the United States) of newspapers, magazines, and industry reports on government, corporate, and business use. The book provides a rich picture of the diverse technical and business innovation narratives of the industry and its variations in the United States and Japan. It is an abundant history of the intricacies in business of matching technical embodiment and user framing to construct a successful industry.