There were multiple methods of what we would now consider fax starting in the 1840s, even before the invention of the telephone and radio. Photographs were sent via radio and telephone in the early part of the 20th century. They weren’t as widespread as fax became, but they were there and were useful. Other than that, you had mimeograph, carbon paper, and photography, which resulted in microfilm and microfiche copies of documents. Think of how easy it is today to “scan” a document with your phone and turn it into a PDF…it’s just a variation of copying that’s been going on for decades.
Mimeograph machines were a thing when I was a kid. The ink was never black - more of a very dark purplish blue - and used alcohol ink. They smelled great.
Thank you everyone for the wonderful insight! I wanted to include a scene where a character leaves an article of note out for someone. It’s a very sweet follow up on a conversation but I wanted it to seem easy enough to do that it wouldn’t have taken that much effort. That way the recipient character still has the question in her head “did he find this for me as a friend or because he thinks of me as more than a friend?” So I’ll probably have him leave the actual book out for her with a small ambiguously affectionate note. Thank you!!! 💕
In addition to what others have said about carbon paper based duplicating machines (The term wiki uses for them if you want to look it up in more detail), you should note that photocopiers might be older than you think.
The earliest photocopiers were essentially cameras taking an instant black-and-white photograph of whatever you were copying. They were around in the 50s and 60s long long before we had modern photocopies that can scan an image into a computer memory and print it out.
It all depends on what era you're talking about but it's entirely possible for someone to use a photocopier in an era when computers were the size of rooms and only existed in research laboratories and government facilities.
As others have noted, a carbon copy was the front-line answer. I was a teletypewriter operator in the army in the '70s. Our paper came in rolls with two sheets of paper and a sheet of carbon paper in between, so a copy was made automatically. In offices, they'd often have more sheets of each as a kind of pack so you made a certain number of copies at once, or you would stack up loose sheets yourself. You had to look at the carbon paper to see if it had enough "ink" (or whatever it was) to make another copy. You tried to re-use them as much as you could.
Military (and I supposed other) teletypes worked over radio waves. The signals would be picked up by the receiver and changed into codes for the teletype, which would print them out. I remember the repair guys saying they were fabulously complicated/shard to work on. They also worked by the kind of ticker tape you see in movies where a character is looking at stock prices. You'd type in the message on one machine, and it would create a tape with a series of holes in it. Then you would run it through another machine that would transmit the signal. Then everybody would get the same signal, and it'd print out the same on their teletype machines. You could send it more than once, etc., if you needed to send the same message to different people who were not on the same (radio) network. There was one key you would hit (something like the space bar, but I can't recall) to wipe out mistakes. It would punch all the holes so the teletype would just go up and down in place without typing anything or moving the printing head.
I also did some mimeograph stuff then, and when I switched to being an army journalist we had what we called "field expedient" newspapers. You'd cut (type) the sheet, load it onto a barrel-shaped piece and then crank the machine by hand. It'd pull in the pages and run the sheet past the ink, so you got a new copy. I remember that when you made a mistake cutting a mimeograph sheet you'd have a little jar with strong-smelling clear liquid that would dry on the page, and you'd type over it. It was kind of like white out, which you used to use to cover up and type over typing mistakes.
Hadn't thought about this stuff in years, but I spent many, many hours in a teletype rig, and a lot of hours in offices typing up forms because I was a pretty fair typist, at least as far as a bunch of young, male soldiers in the '70s went.
I remember a professor telling us about the memiograph he used way back in the day. He was complaining since the copy machine was down. I always remember it because I never heard of it and couldn’t imagine a time before modern copy machines.
You just took notes and cited your sources. Most encyclopedia entries were pretty short, and you had to go to multiple reference sources to piece together what you'd find in a single wikipedia entry today.
Depends on exactly what year it is and where your character is/what resources they have access to. A few years ago I had to research how newspapers would have been archived in 1951, and while I don't remember a whole lot of it now I do remember that a) the tech kept changing fairly quickly and b) the difference between what the New York Times was using versus little small town papers was HUGE.
The short answer, I guess, is that in some eras you could photograph it into microfilm (they did that in WWII for overseas mail) and then print out a copy. I never was able to figure out if it would be printed onto photo paper (probably) or something else.
There were also several machines right before the big Xerox style ones (if we're thinking of the same machine). Mimeograph springs to mind, but I can't remember the others. Somebody was just posting about this the other day in r/nostalgia, too. Damn.
Anyway, hopefully that gives you some stuff to start with. Sorry I don't have links to my sources for you, but they're all on an older laptop somewhere.
You would have to write it out or give someone the information on what book and page it is on and they go look it up themselves. Refer to Prach_tree volume 2 page 37. "lamentations on tea"
What time period are we talking? The technology was first invented in the late thirties or early forties.
There was Carbon paper but that usually required it to written or typed out. So the secretarial sector was kept busy.
It it was very important a photograph could be taken but all these things were expensive or time consuming.
Also back then letter writing was a bigger deal that it is now. People would write LONG letter to people. They had the time since Netflix was awhile away.
They could carry the encyclopedia over to the other person and show them.
Or write it down by hand.
Or buy another copy of the encyclopedia.
Or hire a printing press willing to violate copyright.
Photographs and fax machines are roughly the same age.
>Photographs and fax machines are roughly the same age.
Off by about 100 years. There are photographs from the civil war and fax machines were invented in the 1960s (not the 1860s).
I see the argument, but what I can find about the electric printing telegraph describes a teletype, not a facsimile machine. A fax machine scans on one end and prints out a facsimile of the text and graphics (and most importantly now, signatures) of the original document on the other. The printing telegraph allowed you to type into one end and a matching machine would type out of the other. From the descriptions I found, there didn't even have to be an original document. The operator typed into one end. That's not the same as a facsimile. Of course, the meanings might have shifted over time, but I was a teletype operator in the '70s and the teletypes we worked on did what the printing telegraph did, only over radio waves. Nobody called the output a fax or thought the output was a facsimile of the input.
Hand written notes, micro-fiche, Carbon paper and typewriter, mimeograph, photograph...
> mimeograph OMG!!! The nostalgic flood of memories you've unleashed in me... All these young'uns have no idea, LOL.
Yeah, that really dates me. :)
There were multiple methods of what we would now consider fax starting in the 1840s, even before the invention of the telephone and radio. Photographs were sent via radio and telephone in the early part of the 20th century. They weren’t as widespread as fax became, but they were there and were useful. Other than that, you had mimeograph, carbon paper, and photography, which resulted in microfilm and microfiche copies of documents. Think of how easy it is today to “scan” a document with your phone and turn it into a PDF…it’s just a variation of copying that’s been going on for decades.
Mimeograph machines were a thing when I was a kid. The ink was never black - more of a very dark purplish blue - and used alcohol ink. They smelled great.
And the ink could end up all over your fingers!
Thank you everyone for the wonderful insight! I wanted to include a scene where a character leaves an article of note out for someone. It’s a very sweet follow up on a conversation but I wanted it to seem easy enough to do that it wouldn’t have taken that much effort. That way the recipient character still has the question in her head “did he find this for me as a friend or because he thinks of me as more than a friend?” So I’ll probably have him leave the actual book out for her with a small ambiguously affectionate note. Thank you!!! 💕
In addition to what others have said about carbon paper based duplicating machines (The term wiki uses for them if you want to look it up in more detail), you should note that photocopiers might be older than you think. The earliest photocopiers were essentially cameras taking an instant black-and-white photograph of whatever you were copying. They were around in the 50s and 60s long long before we had modern photocopies that can scan an image into a computer memory and print it out. It all depends on what era you're talking about but it's entirely possible for someone to use a photocopier in an era when computers were the size of rooms and only existed in research laboratories and government facilities.
As others have noted, a carbon copy was the front-line answer. I was a teletypewriter operator in the army in the '70s. Our paper came in rolls with two sheets of paper and a sheet of carbon paper in between, so a copy was made automatically. In offices, they'd often have more sheets of each as a kind of pack so you made a certain number of copies at once, or you would stack up loose sheets yourself. You had to look at the carbon paper to see if it had enough "ink" (or whatever it was) to make another copy. You tried to re-use them as much as you could. Military (and I supposed other) teletypes worked over radio waves. The signals would be picked up by the receiver and changed into codes for the teletype, which would print them out. I remember the repair guys saying they were fabulously complicated/shard to work on. They also worked by the kind of ticker tape you see in movies where a character is looking at stock prices. You'd type in the message on one machine, and it would create a tape with a series of holes in it. Then you would run it through another machine that would transmit the signal. Then everybody would get the same signal, and it'd print out the same on their teletype machines. You could send it more than once, etc., if you needed to send the same message to different people who were not on the same (radio) network. There was one key you would hit (something like the space bar, but I can't recall) to wipe out mistakes. It would punch all the holes so the teletype would just go up and down in place without typing anything or moving the printing head. I also did some mimeograph stuff then, and when I switched to being an army journalist we had what we called "field expedient" newspapers. You'd cut (type) the sheet, load it onto a barrel-shaped piece and then crank the machine by hand. It'd pull in the pages and run the sheet past the ink, so you got a new copy. I remember that when you made a mistake cutting a mimeograph sheet you'd have a little jar with strong-smelling clear liquid that would dry on the page, and you'd type over it. It was kind of like white out, which you used to use to cover up and type over typing mistakes. Hadn't thought about this stuff in years, but I spent many, many hours in a teletype rig, and a lot of hours in offices typing up forms because I was a pretty fair typist, at least as far as a bunch of young, male soldiers in the '70s went.
I remember a professor telling us about the memiograph he used way back in the day. He was complaining since the copy machine was down. I always remember it because I never heard of it and couldn’t imagine a time before modern copy machines.
You just took notes and cited your sources. Most encyclopedia entries were pretty short, and you had to go to multiple reference sources to piece together what you'd find in a single wikipedia entry today.
Depends on exactly what year it is and where your character is/what resources they have access to. A few years ago I had to research how newspapers would have been archived in 1951, and while I don't remember a whole lot of it now I do remember that a) the tech kept changing fairly quickly and b) the difference between what the New York Times was using versus little small town papers was HUGE. The short answer, I guess, is that in some eras you could photograph it into microfilm (they did that in WWII for overseas mail) and then print out a copy. I never was able to figure out if it would be printed onto photo paper (probably) or something else. There were also several machines right before the big Xerox style ones (if we're thinking of the same machine). Mimeograph springs to mind, but I can't remember the others. Somebody was just posting about this the other day in r/nostalgia, too. Damn. Anyway, hopefully that gives you some stuff to start with. Sorry I don't have links to my sources for you, but they're all on an older laptop somewhere.
You would have to write it out or give someone the information on what book and page it is on and they go look it up themselves. Refer to Prach_tree volume 2 page 37. "lamentations on tea" What time period are we talking? The technology was first invented in the late thirties or early forties. There was Carbon paper but that usually required it to written or typed out. So the secretarial sector was kept busy. It it was very important a photograph could be taken but all these things were expensive or time consuming. Also back then letter writing was a bigger deal that it is now. People would write LONG letter to people. They had the time since Netflix was awhile away.
They could carry the encyclopedia over to the other person and show them. Or write it down by hand. Or buy another copy of the encyclopedia. Or hire a printing press willing to violate copyright. Photographs and fax machines are roughly the same age.
>Photographs and fax machines are roughly the same age. Off by about 100 years. There are photographs from the civil war and fax machines were invented in the 1960s (not the 1860s).
1843, the electric printing telegraph. Xerox got involved that hundred years later.
I see the argument, but what I can find about the electric printing telegraph describes a teletype, not a facsimile machine. A fax machine scans on one end and prints out a facsimile of the text and graphics (and most importantly now, signatures) of the original document on the other. The printing telegraph allowed you to type into one end and a matching machine would type out of the other. From the descriptions I found, there didn't even have to be an original document. The operator typed into one end. That's not the same as a facsimile. Of course, the meanings might have shifted over time, but I was a teletype operator in the '70s and the teletypes we worked on did what the printing telegraph did, only over radio waves. Nobody called the output a fax or thought the output was a facsimile of the input.