Fax Machines Explained: History, How They Work, and Whether Anyone Still Uses Them

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

Fax technology is older than most people assume. It did not arrive with 1980s office culture — it predates the telephone itself by more than 30 years.

When Was the Fax Machine Invented?

Quick Answer: The fax machine was invented in 1843 by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain, more than three decades before the telephone, though the office fax machine most people picture didn’t become common until Xerox’s Magnafax Telecopier arrived in 1966. A fax machine scans a paper document, converts the image into a signal, and sends it over a phone line to a receiving machine that reprints it. Setting one up needs a fax machine (or multifunction printer with fax), an analog phone line or fax-compatible connection, and paper. Fax is not obsolete: healthcare, legal, government, and financial organizations still rely on it heavily, mostly now through internet-based “online fax” services rather than a physical machine on a desk.

On May 27, 1843, Scottish clockmaker and inventor Alexander Bain patented the “Electric Printing Telegraph,” the device now recognized as the conceptual ancestor of the fax machine. Bain’s design used two synchronized pendulum clocks, one at the sending end and one at the receiving end, to scan a metal surface holding raised letters and reproduce the image on chemically treated paper at the other end. The synchronization between the two pendulums was the hardest part to get right, and it took decades for later inventors to solve it reliably.

The technology developed gradually after Bain’s patent:

• 1843 — Alexander Bain patents the Electric Printing Telegraph, the first facsimile concept.
• 1850s–1860s — English physicist Frederick Bakewell improves the design with his Image Telegraph; Giovanni Caselli later builds the first commercial fax service (the Pantelegraph), used between Paris and Lyon from the 1860s.
• 1902–1920s — Scanning phototelegraphs and wired/wireless photo transmission make fax practical for newspapers and wire services.
• 1964 — Xerox introduces Long Distance Xerography (LDX), an early commercial long-distance document transmission system.
• 1966 — Xerox releases the Magnafax Telecopier, a lighter 46-pound machine that could connect to any standard telephone line — the design that made fax practical for ordinary offices.
• 1980s–1990s — Fax machines become a fixture of everyday offices worldwide, particularly in Japan, the US, and Europe.
• 1996 onward — Internet faxing (fax-to-email and online fax services) begins to replace dedicated hardware in most businesses.

So while the “fax machine on every office desk” era is a 20th-century memory, the underlying facsimile concept has been around since the Victorian era.

How a Fax Machine Works

A traditional fax machine is really three devices combined into one: an image scanner, a modem, and a printer. Sending a fax follows a consistent process regardless of the machine’s age:

1. Scanning: The sending machine scans the paper document line by line, converting the light and dark areas of the page into a stream of digital or analog signal data (a bitmap of the page).
2. Encoding and dialing: The machine encodes that scanned data into an audio signal and dials the recipient’s fax number over a standard analog telephone line, the same way a dial-up modem would.
3. Handshake: The two machines perform a brief “handshake” — a series of tones — to agree on transmission speed and format before sending the actual page data.
4. Transmission: The encoded image data is transmitted over the phone line to the receiving machine.
5. Decoding and printing: The receiving fax machine decodes the incoming signal back into an image and prints it on paper, producing a copy of the original document.
6. Confirmation: Most machines print or display a transmission report confirming whether the fax was sent successfully, along with the time, date, and recipient number.

Modern “online fax” or internet fax services follow the same logical steps, but the phone-line leg is replaced (fully or partly) by an internet connection, and the “paper” at both ends is often a PDF or scanned image file rather than a physical printout.

How to Use a Fax Machine

Using a physical fax machine is straightforward once it is set up correctly:

• Prepare the document: Make sure pages are single-sided, right-side up, and free of staples or paper clips.
• Load the pages: Place the document face-down (or face-up, depending on the model) into the machine’s document feeder.
• Enter the recipient’s fax number: Use the keypad to dial the full fax number, including any area or country code, exactly as you would dial a phone call.
• Add a cover sheet (optional but common): Many organizations fax a cover page first, listing sender, recipient, date, and page count.
• Press “Send” or “Start”: The machine scans and transmits each page automatically.
• Check the confirmation report: Once transmission finishes, the machine prints or displays a status report showing whether the fax succeeded, and it’s worth keeping this for record purposes.

Receiving a fax on a physical machine requires no action at all — as long as the machine is powered on, connected to its phone line, and has paper and toner loaded, incoming faxes print automatically.

Required Setup for a Fax Machine to Work

A few things need to be in place before a fax machine can send or receive anything:

• A fax machine or multifunction printer (MFP) with fax capability.
• An active analog telephone line (a standard landline-style connection) plugged into the machine’s line jack — most fax machines cannot send over a typical VoIP or fiber internet line without an analog telephone adapter, since fax tones don’t survive VoIP compression well.
• A dedicated or shared phone number for the fax line, ideally separate from a voice line so incoming faxes aren’t interrupted by phone calls.
• Paper and toner/ink loaded in the machine so it can print outgoing confirmations and incoming faxes.
• The recipient’s correct fax number, including any country or area code needed to reach it.

For an online fax service instead of physical hardware, the setup is simpler: an account with the fax provider, a virtual fax number, and an internet connection are usually all that’s required, since documents are uploaded as files (PDF, Word, scanned image) rather than fed through a scanner.

Traditional Fax vs. Online Fax vs. Email

Feature	Traditional Fax Machine	Online/eFax Service	Email
Requires a phone line	Yes	No	No
Hardware needed	Dedicated machine or MFP	None (app/web)	Any device
Sends signed/scanned documents	Yes	Yes	Yes (as attachment)
Delivery confirmation	Printed transmission report	Digital confirmation log	Read receipt (not guaranteed)
Works during internet outages	Yes	No	No
Typical use today	Legacy office/government setups	Healthcare, legal, finance	General business correspondence

Has the Fax Machine Been Rendered Obsolete? Does Anyone Still Use It?

The short answer is no — fax has not disappeared, even though the physical machine on an office desk has become far less common. What has changed is the delivery method, not the underlying need.

Several industries continue to rely on fax specifically because of its legal and regulatory standing:

• Healthcare: Faxing remains a dominant communication method for prescriptions, referrals, lab results, and payer correspondence, in large part because it is explicitly recognized as compliant under regulations such as HIPAA in the US.
• Legal and government: Fax transmission reports provide a timestamped, machine-generated proof of sending and receiving, which courts, regulators, and public agencies often still accept as a verifiable record — something a standard email read receipt doesn’t reliably offer.
• Finance and insurance: Signed documents faxed with a confirmation page are treated as more tamper-resistant than an email attachment, since the transmission doesn’t pass through the same shared internet mail servers.
• Emergency and low-connectivity settings: Because a traditional fax can run over an analog phone line, it can still work during internet or network outages when other digital tools fail.

The market data backs this up. Industry estimates put global fax volume at roughly 17 billion pages sent per year, with the US healthcare sector alone exchanging over 9 billion fax pages annually, according to industry tracking. Analysts tracking the online fax market project continued growth over the next several years, driven almost entirely by the shift from physical machines to cloud-based and app-based fax services rather than any rebound in demand for hardware.

What is genuinely disappearing is the standalone fax machine itself. Consumers essentially stopped buying them years ago, and most businesses that still fax do so through multifunction printers or, increasingly, through online fax platforms that send and receive faxes as PDFs from a computer or phone, without a physical machine at all. So the honest way to put it: the fax machine as a piece of hardware is fading out, but faxing as a communication method, particularly where compliance and verifiable delivery matter, is still very much in active use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who invented the fax machine and when?

Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, patented the Electric Printing Telegraph in 1843, the earliest device recognized as the ancestor of the modern fax machine.

Do fax machines need a phone line?

Traditional fax machines need an analog telephone line to dial and transmit signals. They generally cannot send reliably over standard VoIP service without an analog telephone adapter, since VoIP compression can distort the fax tones.

Can I send a fax without owning a fax machine?

Yes. Online or internet fax services let a person send and receive faxes from a computer, tablet, or phone by uploading a document as a file, without any dedicated hardware.

Why do hospitals and law firms still use fax?

Mainly for regulatory and evidentiary reasons: fax transmission reports give a timestamped, verifiable record of delivery that is widely accepted as compliant and legally defensible, which is harder to guarantee with standard email.

Is the fax machine obsolete?

The standalone hardware is increasingly rare, but faxing as a method of sending documents is still active and even growing in some sectors, largely because it has moved to internet-based delivery rather than disappearing.