It's 2021, and we're still talking about fax machines

At least a little bit.

On an airplane flight, in the early-to-mid 1990s, I had an epiphany: fax machines were apparently a big deal, and I had completely missed their rise. The insight occurred from one too many times looking at the airline in-flight magazine, and noticing all the fax-related ads. Apparently business people needed them.

The reason I missed the burst of fax machines was that I was using email relatively early. I don't claim this as special status; it also apparently isolated me from something affecting a lot of other people.

It's easy to think that email has killed fax, but apparently it hasn't. In the final month of 2020, the New York Times mentions fax in articles about neo-nazi threats in Germany, health care workers expecting to get coronavirus information from states by fax, and trying to get a comment from the government of China about actions in Hong Kong. If fax is on its way out, it's taking its own sweet time.

Back in 2015, James Coopersmith published a book called Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press), documenting the fax story from its invention in 1843 (before the telephone!) to its apparently disappearance by 2010. There was a nice overview of what happened from the BBC in 2015: Why the fax machine isn’t quite dead yet.

Apparently it's still not dead. But it might be hard to find one by the 200th birthday of the fax in 22 years.