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| Data Transmission and Reception |
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| Introduction |
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| Telefacsimile's or Fax machines are a must for many businesses around the world. The fax machine however, did not become widely used until the late 1980's. A fax means basically scanning a page to make an electronic representation of its text or graphics, compresses the data to save transmission time, and transmits it to another facsimile machine. The receiving machine decrypts the signal and uses a printer (usually built in) to make a facsimile of the original page. |
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| Brief history |
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| The history of the fax machine begins in 1843 in England with Alexander Bain. He devised an apparatus made up of two pens connected to two pendulums. He joined the two together with a wire, and was able to reproduce writing onto an electrically conductive surface. |
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| Some years later, in 1862, Italian physicist Giovanni Casellli built a machine, which he called a pantelegraph. This was based on Bain's invention but also included a synchronizing apparatus. It basically had the same effect as Bain's invention. His pantelegraph was used by the French Post and Telegraph agency between Paris and Marseilles from 1856 to 1870. |
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| Elisha Gray, an American inventor, invented and patented many electrical devices, including a facsimile transmission system. He almost patented the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell beat him to it by only a few hours. Gray organized a company that later became known as the western Electric Company. |
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| Another man, 1902, by the name of Arthur Korn, invented telephotography, a means for manually breaking down and transmitting still photographs by means of electrical wires. In 1907, Korn sent the first inter-city fax when he transmitted a photograph from Munich to Berlin. This was perhaps the greatest boost the fax machine had faced so far, and soon many people would try to perfect the machine. |
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| In France, Edouard Beeline constructed the Belinograph. His invention involved placing an image on a cylinder and scanning it with a powerful light beam that had a photoelectric cell, which could convert light, or the absence of light, into transmittable electrical impulses. The Belinograph process used the basic principle upon which all subsequent facsimile transmission machines would be based. |
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| Today's fax machine owes their core design to the Belinograph although many fax machines have changes over the years. Several companies would try to develop the fax machine, and one such company was Xerox. |
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| For several years, the fax machine was expensive and difficult to operate; perhaps explaining why it was never used by businesses prior to the 1980's. in 1966, the Xerox Company introduced a smaller model that would be more accessible to users by sending its transmissions over existing telephone lines. You could send a document from one fax machine to another in about 6 minutes this way. This is slow for today, but back then it represented a significant step toward great technology. |
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| The Japanese soon entered this market, and soon started to develop smaller, faster, easier to use machines once they saw the great potential behind this technology. Today, many companies including Hewlett Packard, Xerox, Panasonic, and a host of others make fax machines. |
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