Fax machine what is

A little black girl sat on the floor, and with her hands worked the treadle of the machine. The sewing-machine made a resounding clatter in the room; it was of a ponderous, by-gone make. The machine penetrated everywhere, thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handicraft.

New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for fax machine on Thesaurus. A device that sends and receives printed pages or images over telephone lines by digitizing the material with an internal optical scanner and transmitting the information as electronic signals. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.

Words nearby fax machine fawn lily , fawny , fax , Faxa Bay , Fa Xian , fax machine , fax modem , fay , Fayal , fayalite , Faye correction. In fact, the fax was invented in , three decades before the telephone. Faxes have kept the same fundamental design and function since that time, but the mechanics have changed, Coopersmith said. In the 19th century, a fax machine's stylus moved over a document that was held in place.

Each document had a message that was written in ink coated with a treated dry resin known as shellac powder. Today, faxes optically scan documents without physically touching them.

These machines shine a light, which reflects off of the black or printed areas of the surface but not the white or blank areas. Related: Who invented the car? But how do faxes talk to each other? Before sending a document, the two faxes in different locations have a quick conversation, called a handshake, to confirm there's really a fax machine on the other end, explained Abe Lopes, owner of Ace Copy Inc.

Fax machines split a page up into a grid of many tiny squares, similar to pixels. In real time, the sending fax reads one line of squares at a time and uses beeps to tell the receiving fax whether the squares are black or white represented by ones and zeroes, respectively , Lopes said.

The key to a functioning fax is having two separate telephone lines, Lopes said. One line for the actual phone and another for the fax. That means paper jams, starting over, or both.