Reflections
The End of An Era
by Robert Silverberg
I canceled my fax service the other day. It had dawned on me—belatedly, very belatedly—that I was paying AT&T, my telephone service out here in California, forty-seven dollars a month for something I hadn’t used in—well, at least several years, perhaps more.
Forty-seven dollars used to be enough to buy a glorious dinner for two, with wine included, at one of the best French restaurants in New York, back in the era, sixty years ago, when I lived in New York. It wouldn’t even cover the tip at such places, these days. But even so one can always find useful things to do with forty-seven dollars, and simply throwing that sum away every month on a service I no longer use makes no sense to someone like me who was born during the Great Depression and still quaintly believes that a dollar has some value.
The fax was hardly a new invention when I got mine, more than forty years ago. In May 1843, the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a patent for his “Electric Printing Telegraph,” a device that could transmit images. As the name implies, it used telegraph wires—another innovation of the time. Other inventors improved on that, notably the Italian Giovanni Caselli, so that by 1865 there was commercial fax service between Paris and Lyon—this eleven years before the invention of the telephone! Then came a process of scanning photographs for fax transmission, making use of another new invention—the radio. By 1924, AT&T engineers had worked out a process for transmitting photographs by telephone, and further developments in the following years led to the creation of small fax machines suitable for home use.
I first heard about faxes at the dawn of my career, when, as a very young writer (still a college undergraduate, as a matter of fact) I started selling stories to that greatest of all science fiction editors, John W. Campbell of the magazine that was then called Astounding Science Fiction. My first sale to him was a novelette called “The Chosen People,” which I wrote in collaboration with Randall Garrett in the summer of1955. Campbell was not the sort of editor who rewrote stories himself—he would put writers through any number of rewrites, but then would publish the writer’s own final draft as it stood. This time, though, Campbell added one sentence to our story. A message needed to be transmitted, and he wrote in, as I looked on, “Sent by fast telefax.” (A little redundant, since how could there be a slow telefax, when faxes would travel at the speed of light? And the magazine’s printer, perhaps a little confused or just having trouble reading Campbell’s flamboyant handwriting, called it a “telefox” when the story appeared the following spring. We fixed that when the tale was published in book form.)
Some years later I got a fax machine of my own. I was once what was called an Early Adopter, quick to latch on any new gadget that seemed interesting and useful—such things as the Sony Walkman, the CD player, the video recorder, the DVD player, and, when the home fax machine appeared on the market about 1981, a fax machine. I don’t regard myself as an Early Adopter anymore—I am, in fact, now an Old Fogey—and I don’t rush to grab new gizmos these days. It’s one of the privileges of old age, I like to say. I am a stranger in a strange land when it comes to apps and social media and streamed music and just about anything else that was only a technological fantasy a decade ago. But I was one of the first to get a fax machine, and I was evangelical about the things, urging my various business associates to get them, too. After all, a fax is of no use unless there’s somebody on the other end of the line to connect with.
Among my first converts was my agent of those days, Ralph Vicinanza. Ralph and I would talk all the time, he in New York and me in California, and the phone bills could become pretty significant. Some of the conversation quickly devolved from business talk (“I have an offer for French rights for your new novel—do you want to accept it?”) to personal chitchat, and though the chitchat was fun, because we were close friends as well as having a business relationship, it did run up the bills. With the fax, Ralph could simply send me a query about that French deal (not worrying about the complications caused by the three-hour time difference between New York and California) and I could scribble “okay” on a sheet of paper and fax it back to him. And he could fax it on to our representative in Paris. Deal done, right away. Not even any postage costs.
I also talked Alice Turner, the brilliant fiction editor of Playboy, into getting one. Alice’s office was in Chicago, I was in California, and I was writing a lot of stories for her. She often asked for rewrites, almost always improving the story in the process. I was never one for going along with editorial rewrite orders, but Alice was something special as an editor, and I always paid close attention to her suggestions. Impatient people like Alice and me regarded the mails as much too slow for the necessary back-and-forth. So I would do some new pages and shoot them back to her by fax, and she would give me her verdict by return fax, often replying in what was the dawn hour in California. I well remember mornings when I would go to my office with some trepidation first thing in the morning and see, before I had even entered the building—the office has a glass door—a sheet of fax paper lying in front of the machine, and thus knowing that Alice had sent me, early that day, a yea or a nay on the current opus. (In those days faxes used special paper, flimsy shiny stuff that came in rolls, so that when I looked through the door I would see the latest fax curled up in front of the machine. The special disadvantage of that was that the fax printout would fade pretty quickly, and so the faxes of that far-off era, if not photocopied immediately, would vanish into illegibility within a few months. Later fax machines were designed for plain paper, a much better idea.)
Someone who absolutely did not want a fax was Isaac Asimov. In the late1980s, Isaac and I collaborated on three novels based on celebrated novellas of his, and on the first two of them a lot of story discussion was necessary. (Isaac was very ill by the time of the third book, and I wrote it all by myself.) I suggested that we correspond by fax, but he said no, a very emphatic no: he would not go near the things, because he was sometimes a man of impulsive decision who did not suffer fools gladly, and it would be all too easy for him to write an angry letter, something he might regret a few minutes later, and pop it immediately into the fax before he had had a chance to reflect on the situation. He preferred to put the letter aside, address an envelope, find a stamp, and then in a somewhat cooler frame of mind to re-read what he had written—so there were no faxes for him, and we worked out the plot ideas of our collaborative books by telephone or, if necessary, by archaic postal means. (There was no e-mail yet in those days. Believe me, o ye who are under forty—there was no e-mail! And Isaac probably would not have used it if there had been.)
And then the fax itself began to become archaic. By the mid-1980s most writers I knew began to switch from typewriters to computers, and I was one of them (so, too, was Isaac). A few years later came the Internet, and with the Internet, eventually, the scanner. My first computer didn’t have a scanner, and I remained dependent on faxes for instant communication of documents for quite a while, until the time somewhere about twenty years ago when I needed to send a contract for a story in an anthology I was editing to Gregory Benford, and told him I would fax it to him.
“The fax is obsolescent technology, you know,” Greg pointed out.
I realized that he was right. If I had a scanner, I could scan the contract, stick the scan on my computer’s desktop, and e-mail it to him—without the bother of putting the pages in the fax, making sure they scanned without jamming (which happened all too often), typing out the telephone number of Benford’s own fax machine, and sending it off, hoping that no technological glitch would interfere. And so I got myself a scanner, hooked it to my computer of the era, and began to allow the fax machine to gather dust.
I still would get the occasional fax. Some people didn’t have scanners, and some, a few, just liked to keep on sending faxes. I also would get junk faxes now and then, a new and unwelcome development of our tawdry modern age, advertisers who had somehow gotten hold of my fax number sending me unwanted offers for this or that unwanted bargain, thus using up paper for me against my will. As the junk faxes multiplied and the important faxes gave way to scanned documents, I took heed of Benford’s sage remark and turned the fax machine off. And there it still sits, next to my desk, an antiquated artifact for which, I realized the other day, I am still paying forty-seven dollars a month for the remote possibility that I might want to use it.
So it is goodbye to the old fax, which once was such an exciting new communications device. It served me well, once upon a time, a good and faithful servant. But its day was done.