No office is complete without a fax machine, so you would probably think that it was a modern invention. But the earliest facsimile machine was actually invented thirty years before the telephone, in 1842.
Today faxes run a sheet of paper through rolls, using optical chips to record the image. These chips did not exist until the late 1960s, but machines using photoelectric cells, invented by Edouard Belin in 1907, sent the light and dark parts of a picture as electrical pulses. By 1902 Arthur Korn had already invented a similar machine. Even earlier, in 1898, Ernest A. Hummel invented the copying telegraph, which sent pictures between major newspapers in the United States.
But long before Hummel there was a way to transmit images. In 1855 Giovanni Caselli made the pantelegraph, synchronizing the sending and receiving machines with an electronic heartbeat and sending pulses between them. But even this was just an improvement on the original facsimile machine.
In 1842 the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain (1811-1877) invented the recording telegraph, the ancestor of the modern fax machine. Using a pendulum swung over metal type, the machine detected light and dark spots. It transmitted the spots as electrical pulses like Morse code and a receiver stained the image onto chemically treated paper. The machines were popular with newspapers, which needed images quickly, and with the Chinese and Japanese, who have pictograms rather than an alphabet and could not use Morse code. A synchronization of all fax machines in 1983 made them fast enough for the modern world.
