The basics 101 by John Sung Kim

Sending faxes over the internet really just means that while traditional faxes send text as images, the combination of an internet fax service such as RingCentral’s with Adobe PDF Software means that those faxes can be read as text. For attorneys and many small businesses where compliance and record keeping are essential, this is a large step in not only saving money on fax costs, but being able to store their documents and contracts as digital, readable files.

Internet Fax Functionality

One can scan a document as one normally does in a fax, but in a traditional fax the data sent over the telephone line is not recordable. Once a fax is sent, there’s no way to resend it unless it lives in the short-term memory of the fax machine itself (which are notoriously low-computing machines).

In an internet based fax, the data sent is over the internet and that means that documents and image faxed can be stored permanently and automatically into an e-mail inbox or folder. What I particularly like about RingCentral’s Online Fax Service is that they’re also a virtual phone system provider. I can see a record of all the faxes ever sent or received. That alone is a big deal for any small law firm or sales team that relies on getting faxed contracts.

And if the notoriously unreliable fax machines and transmission are at best 95% successful per dial-tone ring over the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) while internet faxing is 99.9% reliable, no one should hear, “did you get that fax?”

Adobe Acrobat Functionality

Because faxes are sent and received as images, one didn’t have the ability to send a fax and then edit it (or store it) as a Word document on a computer. Sounds ridiculous, but think about it – it’s true. Only until Adobe Acrobat (and only recent versions started to do this very well) could one take an internet-based fax transmission (basically a picture of a document) and quickly decode it back into text to be saved as a Microsoft Word document. (They would probably prefer you to save it as an Adobe PDF doc, but still – they’re both good and work just fine).

Did I mention that it saves paper and is better for the environment?

(*I should disclose here that RingCentral hired me to write for them, but we do use RingCentral in our offices as our primary PBX).

Faxing has become one of those technologies that you can’t do without.

Do you ever have those moments in life when you wonder how people survived in the past without a certain technology? I often ask my mother how she grew up on the Texas coast without air conditioning and she always says “we didn’t know any better”.

Every time I send a fax online, I wonder the same thing. The introduction of the fax to the mainstream business world started a worldwide shift in how we do business. Things didn’t halt for a few days waiting on the client to get the contract and then have it sent back. It set up the current ideology that we can have things now rather than later.

If you needed to get a document to someone in the past, you would have to hire a courier or package delivery service especially if it needed to get there overnight. This involved putting the document together, calling the courier, giving it to them only to have them put it on a plane (or delivery truck), hope and pray that something bad doesn’t happen and then have the document handed to the person it was meant for.

If you lived close, this was a fairly quick process, but what if you wanted to get a document from Miami to Seattle in the late-1950s? Very rarely would it happen overnight unless you sent one of your employees to Seattle and even that might be pushing it.

Luckily, the fax machine has changed all of that. Many think that it was invented in the 1980s and they will be surprised to find out that fax technology was actually created in 1843 by a little known Scotsman named Alexander Bain. The telegraph machine had been created by Samuel Morse in 1835 and Mr. Bain used that technology to help evolve his idea of “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs”.

While the telegraph machine sent dots and dashes across the world, Alexander Bain’s machine used a stylus mounted on a pendulum that would scan a flat metal surface containing images.

This was a breakthrough in communications during a time when new inventions seemed to happen every day. Since that time, the fax machine was improved upon by several different inventors.

• 1850 – F.C. Blakewell invented the Copying Telegraph.
• 1860 – The first fax was sent between Paris and Lyon using a Pantelegraph, invented by Giovanni Caselli.
• 1895 – A watchmaker from America named Ernest Hummel invented the Telediagraph.
• 1902 – Dr. Arthur Korn took a big leap when he invented the Photoelectric System.
• 1914 – Edouard Belin realized the benefits of using remote fax for journalism.
• 1924 – Politicians got involved and started using the Telephotography Machine to send political convention photographs to newspapers. AT&T developed the machine.
• 1926 – RCA created the Radiophoto which faxed documents using radiowaves.
• 1947 – The very first successful fax machine as we know it was invented by Alexander Muirhead.
• 1955 – First radio fax transmission was sent to the other side of the continent.

In the past 5-10 years, the biggest improvement has been online fax machine technology. It helps to save on paper costs and can be lightning fast. It also allows the receiver to file the fax virtually so that it can be referenced quickly in the future. You simply send the fax with your computer and the receiver gets it. What could be faster than that? Telepathic faxing, maybe?

The next time you are sending a fax, be it physically or by internet fax, think about all of those thinkers before you that worked hard to bring this technology to fruition and ask yourself, how did we live without it?

Photo by cliff1066™