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WonderHistory fact

The fax is older than the telephone. The Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented a way of copying marks over telegraph wires in 1843, and a fax service ran between Paris and Lyon from 1865, 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876.

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History

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Bain, a crofter's son from Caithness in the far north of Scotland, trained as a clockmaker, and his machine relied on that skill. Two pendulums, kept in step by clocks, swept line by line across the message: at the sending end a probe passed over metal pins set in an insulating cylinder and turned them into on-off electrical pulses, which marked chemically treated paper at the receiving end. His device stayed experimental. The Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli built the first practical version, the pantelegraph, and its Paris to Lyon service was mostly used to check signatures for banks. The word fax is short for facsimile, from the Latin fac simile, 'make alike'. Fax machines only became standard office equipment in the 1980s.

Türkçe oku
Faks, telefondan daha eski bir icattır. İskoç saatçi Alexander Bain, telgraf telleri üzerinden yazı ve işaretleri kopyalamanın bir yolunu bulup 1843'te patentini aldı. Paris ile Lyon arasında 1865'te faks hizmeti başladı; Alexander Graham Bell telefonun patentini ise ancak 1876'da aldı.

İskoçya'nın en kuzeyindeki Caithness'ta, küçük bir kiracı çiftçinin oğlu olarak doğan Bain, saatçilik eğitimi almıştı; makinesi de bu ustalığa dayanıyordu. Bir saatin eş zamanlı çalıştırdığı iki sarkaç, mesajı satır satır tarıyordu. Gönderen tarafta metal bir uç, yalıtkan bir silindire dizilmiş metal çivilerin üzerinden geçip onları kesik kesik elektrik sinyallerine çeviriyordu; alıcı tarafta bu sinyaller, kimyasal bir çözeltiye batırılmış kâğıtta iz bırakıyordu. Bain'in cihazı deneme aşamasında kaldı. İlk kullanışlı sürümünü İtalyan fizikçi Giovanni Caselli pantelegraf adıyla yaptı; Paris-Lyon hattı çoğunlukla bankalar için imza doğrulamada kullanıldı. Faks sözcüğü, Latince “benzerini yap” demek olan fac simile'den türeyen faksimile'nin kısaltmasıdır. Faks makineleri ancak 1980'lerde bürolarda sıradan bir araç hâline geldi.

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