What came first? The fax machine or the telephone? It isn’t a trick question or anything. I’ll let you stew on it a little. What was your answer?
If you answered telephone, you won’t be hearing a little (Alexander Graham) Bell. The fax machine, or the “Electric Printing Telegraph” was invented in 1846 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, with the first commercial fax service commencing in 1865. This was all 11 years before the debut of the telephone.
Funnily enough, we are living in an age closer to the telephone than the fax machine. Though fax machines were the must-have business machine of the 80s and 90s, it took over 150 years for it to be adopted as a de facto standard. It was rendered obsolete in record time by another invention that also took decades to catch on: email.
Email was invented in about 1971, with the first electronic mail message sent over the precursor to the public internet, ARPAnet. It wasn’t until the end of the century that everyone had at least one email address, perhaps something angsty, edgy, and laden with pop culture references at Hotmail dot com.
Though the pace of innovations seems to be accelerating, nothing yet has swept email into the dustbin of history. This isn’t through lack of trying, of course. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Hubspot, CRMs, etc. – they all seem to compliment email rather than getting rid of it entirely.
To be fair, why would you?