Raleigh J. Wise and Ivan S. Coggeshall contributed a technical paper on a facsimile system developed by the Western Union Telegraph Company to the May 1941 issue of the Proceedings of the IRE. Before describing the paper, I will say a few words about the authors.

Wise was born in Hickory, North Carolina in 1897 and graduated in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1919. He then joined Western Union and headed a group in the engineering department in New York City that developed a facsimile telegraph system. In November 1935, Western Union began public facsimile service using this system, and the company also provided direct communication between customers equipped with Western Union Deskfax machines beginning in the 1930's.

Coggeshall was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1896 and worked as a telegraph operator for the Postal Telegraph Cable Company from 1912 to 1917. He joined Western Union as an engineer apprentice in 1917 and remained with the company until his retirement as an Assistant Vice President in 1959. He joined the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) in 1926 and served as its President in 1951. He also was active in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) which he joined in 1930 and for which he served as manager of technical operations just prior to the AIEE-IRE merger to form the IEEE in 1962. He was editor of IEEE Electrical Engineering, a management newsletter, from 1966 to 1972.

In their paper, Wise and Coggeshall reported that Western Union was employing facsimile for transmission of approximately 300 000 telegrams per year. The facsimile machine they described used a cylindrical scanning drum driven by a synchronous motor that produced a peripheral or trace speed of 1400 inches per minute. With this speed and an advance perpendicular to the trace of 100 lines per inch, the machine achieved a scan rate of 14 square inches per minute, which they noted was higher than any other facsimile machine in daily use in the United States.

In the facsimile machine a narrow beam of light that was interrupted 2500 times per second by a chopper wheel reflected from the trace point to a photoelectric cell. A second photocell was illuminated by a second lamp, and the combined output from the two photocells fed an amplifier. The amplitude of the 2500 Hz signal depended on the difference in output from the two photocells. The system was calibrated for zero output when scanning blank paper and for maximum output when scanning a black pencil mark. A completed message dropped into a hopper, and scanning of another drum with another telegram could start within five seconds.

A receiving drum was synchronized using impulses from a 60 Hz tuning-fork generator. Recording paper known as teledeltos was coated with an emulsion that produced black marking when a signal current passed through the paper. The teledeltos paper did not require processing and was said not to deteriorate with lengthy exposure to light. The recording paper was supplied in large rolls inscribed with telegraph blanks. A revolving knife was employed to cut off a completed message that was released onto a conveyor belt. Wise and Coggeshall stated that the facsimile system freed the operators from various "keyboard hazards" and had resulted in greater productivity than achieved in older forms of telegraphy. They mentioned recent efforts to facilitate use of facsimile telegraphy by the public by means of an unattended transmitter that could be activated by key or push button.

Facsimile had enjoyed a long history even by 1941. Alexander Bain operated an experimental telegraph facsimile in 1842 using two synchronized pendulums. Giovanni Caselli introduced a commercial facsimile system in France in the 1860's. The Bartlane facsimile system named for Harry G. Bartholomew and Maynard D. McFarlane was developed in Great Britain around 1920 and used digital picture transmission. This system was used to transmit pictures between London and New York by submarine telegraph cable. The Radio Corporation of America developed a radio facsimile system that could provide commercial services between Europe and the United States by 1926. William G. H. Finch (1897-1990) patented a color facsimile machine in 1938 that could transmit colored documents by telephone or radio.

Business and personal use of telefax has grown dramatically over the past decade. The Japanese have found facsimile to be especially useful since it can transmit material in kanji script as readily as Roman script. Early in 1989 it was reported that more than 2.5 million fax machines were in use in Japan and that Japanese manufacturers were dominant in the field of fax products. The sales of fax machines in the United States quadrupled from 1986 to 1988 and the number in use was about three million by the end of 1989. The global fax market was estimated at about five billion dollars in 1989. A copy of this essay was sent to the PROCEEDINGS in New York City by telefax.

The September 1976 issue of the PROCEEDINGS contained a delightful paper by Ivan S. Coggeshall entitled "Ten Vignettes of an Engineering Institute." He discussed the IEEE, engineering. ethics, what engineers do, and the future. He concluded that "our Institute, still young in spirit while having aims and objectives, has no final goal, Ian fall, anchorage, journey's end, or port of disembarkation." Coggeshall died August 9, 1990, at the age of 93.