First Fax Machine: Alexander Bain's Chemical Telegraph

Three decades before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, and over a century before the modern office fax machine beeped into existence, a Scottish clockmaker named Alexander Bain was already transmitting rudimentary images over electrical wires. His 1843 patent for the "e;Chemical Telegraph"e; is one of the most astonishing, premature technological breakthroughs of the Victorian era. B...