It started with a problem.
Alexander Bain patented the principle of the facsimile machine in Britain in 1843 — a device that scanned a document electrically and reproduced it elsewhere. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated an improved version at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Commercial telefax services operated in France from 1865 and across major European rail lines by the late nineteenth century. In 1966, Xerox introduced the Magnafax Telecopier — the first modern commercial fax machine — which could send a document over an ordinary phone line in about six minutes. Japanese manufacturers including Sharp and Matsushita improved the technology through the 1970s, reducing cost and transmission time, which drove adoption in the 1980s.
Historical sources below ↓Then something changed.
Fax machines became standard business equipment in the 1980s largely because they could transmit a document with a signature, allowing contracts and orders to be executed at a distance without waiting for postal delivery. Before secure electronic signatures, the faxed signature was often treated as legally acceptable for business purposes, a convenience that post services could not match for speed. This made the fax machine particularly important for legal, medical, and financial businesses. By the time email attachments could serve the same function, many industries had built workflows around fax that persisted decades longer than the technology's technical relevance.
What a builder can learn.
Our interpretation: the fax machine's longevity in some industries is a case study in workflow lock-in. Once a process is built around a tool — fax numbers on letterheads, legal standards that reference faxed documents, clinic workflows timed to fax receipt — the cost of changing the tool exceeds the benefit of the newer alternative, at least for existing participants. For a business builder, entering a market where workflows are locked to a specific tool is both a challenge and an opportunity: the challenge of compatibility, and the opportunity to offer something substantially better.
A door still open.
A hypothesis worth testing: if a small business identified one workflow where it still used a legacy communication format — fax, printed form, mailed invoice — not because it was better but because it matched a partner's expectation, and offered that partner a digital alternative for six months, would the partner adopt it?
Which communication process in your business persists not because it is the best tool but because changing it would require changing a partner's workflow as well?
Follow the evidence.
History is sourced below. Business lessons are editorial interpretations; future possibilities are questions to test, not predictions.
Prepared from primary-source histories. First edition: 25 Sept 2026.