The fax machine is older than the telephone

The order we carry in our heads — telephone first, fax much later — is backwards. In 1843, the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented a device capable of sending images over telegraph wire: the direct ancestor of the fax machine. Alexander Graham Bell wouldn't patent the telephone until 1876, thirty-three years later.

Nor did it stay on paper. In 1865, the pantelegraph of the Italian Giovanni Caselli entered commercial service between Paris and Lyon: customers sent signatures and drawings from one city to the other, eleven years before the telephone existed. Napoleon III was one of its great enthusiasts.

Why does it sound so modern, then? Because a technology doesn't triumph when it's invented, but when the world needs it: the fax waited for the offices of the seventies and eighties, became ubiquitous… and within twenty years was shoved aside by email.

The moral fits in one line: some ideas arrive neither late nor early; they arrive when someone is waiting for them.