Electric Documents : ‘80s Memo: Just the Fax, Ma’am

The San Francisco attorney paced the halls of his firm’s offices late one night. He was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a written appraisal from Los Angeles that he needed to close a big real estate deal.

His client’s instructions had been explicit: The transaction had to close before midnight or the client would lose tax benefits worth thousands of dollars. Tension mounted as the evening wore on and the document failed to appear.

Periodically, the lawyer would poke his head into the firm’s telecommunications center and stare at the idle facsimile machine. He was counting on the machine--a technological marvel that can transmit or receive documents and drawings over telephone lines--to deliver the crucial materials.

Finally, the phone rang. The fax machine whirred to life. But instead of producing the anticipated appraisal, the machine scrolled out an advertisement for “Mr. Fax,” a firm that sells supplies for facsimile machines.

‘Electronic Junk Mail’

“Electronic junk mail!” the lawyer exclaimed, recalling his frustration. “I was so mad I almost kicked the machine.” Fortunately, he did not; within minutes, the phone rang again and the machine printed out the needed document.

The lawyer’s experience spotlights two basic facts about fax: that the machines have become indispensable in today’s fast-paced world, and that they have become so ubiquitous they have spawned entire new categories of entrepreneurs who are trying to cash in on the boom. U.S. fax sales have grown about fivefold since 1982, and observers predict a four-fold increase--to 1.2 million machines--over the next five years.

No fewer than three companies now publish directories of fax telephone numbers. Other entrepreneurs mine these directories to send out the faxed equivalent of junk mail. Computer makers offer devices allowing PCs to communicate with fax machines. And hundreds of neighborhood copy shops sell facsimile service to the faxless, typically charging $1 or $2 a page.

Love Them, Hate Them

Lawyers and other paper pushers love fax machines. Messengers, who view them as a threat to their livelihood, hate them. And self-styled futurists who have long ballyhooed the “paperless office of the future” and electronic mail wish they would just go away.

Not a chance. “You’ll never, ever be able to put everything in electronic form,” said Frank May, vice president for marketing of Telautograph Corp., a Los Angeles firm that markets the Omnifax brand facsimile machine.

“Psychologically, people need to have documents to shuffle,” May added. “As long as there are trees left, the paperless office is nothing but someone’s fantasy.”

Fax machines also appeal to “computer illiterates who need instant communications,” noted Donald J. Ryan, a market researcher with CAP International in Marsh-field, Mass. With fax machines, there are no modems to fuss with or communications parameters to set; unlike PCs, fax machines are universally compatible.

There also are cost advantages. “Fax is a lot cheaper than Telex,” said Clint Childs, a telecommunications analyst with Crowley Maritime, a San Francisco firm that faxes manifests and bills of lading to its barges and tugboats around the world. “You don’t have to hire an expensive operator to key in a message. A mail clerk can operate a fax. Fax is the future.”

The facts appear to bear him out. Faxes, once restricted mainly to large corporations, are moving steadily into small business, medicine, government and the home. There are even mobile fax machines for use in boats and cars.

Faxes are used to transmit documents thousands of miles--or between rooms in the same building.

The Harbor City Medical Center in Los Angeles, for example, has an internal fax network of nearly 40 machines. Doctors there use the machines to transmit prescriptions to the hospital’s pharmacy, or to rush medical charts to operating rooms. The transmissions rarely exceed a mile.

Across the Ocean

At the other end of the spectrum is Mark A. Edy, a Millcreek, Wash., sales representative for wood and lumber products. Edy’s home fax machine is busy almost every night, sending proposals to buyers across the Pacific Ocean in Japan and receiving their faxed replies.

“I bought my fax machine six months ago,” Edy said. “Now I wonder how I was able to live without one.” Edy’s unattended machine often prints out faxed replies from Japanese buyers while he sleeps.

Another fax enthusiast is Andrew Cramer, owner of Headlines, a chain of new wave clothing and gift stores in San Francisco. Cramer’s fax sits by his desk, and he uses it to transmit orders to his suppliers--and jokes, comics and other sight gags to his friends. “I love my fax,” the ebullient merchandiser said.

Such praise, of course, is music to the ears of fax machine manufacturers. Japan accounts for virtually all of the world’s production, with Ricoh by far the largest manufacturer. U.S. firms such as AT&T;, Telautograph, Harris/3M and Pitney Bowes sell Japanese-made machines under their own brand names.

Fax sellers cite speed, ease of use, reliability and tumbling prices for the machines’ popularity.

Dataquest Inc., a Silicon Valley market research concern, calculates that the average retail price of a fully equipped machine has fallen to $2,200 from $4,200 in 1983; decent machines can be had for a little more than $1,000.

Manufacturers are counting on their new plain-paper faxes--most current models use flimsy, thermal paper--and small, “personal” desk top faxes to spur sales even more. If “personal” fax machines take hold, can faxed love letters be far behind?

The growing size of the nation’s fax network also spurs growth. “Every new machine adds to the utility of the fax network,” said Dataquest analyst Julie Weiss. “It takes two faxes to communicate. If all your customers or suppliers have them, a fax machine becomes a much more compelling purchase.”

“This is the next boom market in telecommunications technology,” echoed Casey Dworkin, general manager of Personal Technology Research, a Boston-based market research and consulting firm.

One sign of the times: Webster’s New World Dictionary itself has given its imprimatur to the word fax. It can be used as a verb, as in “fax this article to the main office.” The word can also be used to define the machine itself (“my fax is broken”) or its output (“this fax is illegible!”).

Unlisted Numbers

Some businesses include their fax numbers on stationery and business cards. Others, wary of receiving junk faxes, jealously guard their fax numbers. “A lot of people want unlisted numbers,” said a partner in FDP Associates, a New York publisher of fax directories.

“The sleeping giant has finally woken up,” said George M. Stamps, an Oxford, Ga., fax enthusiast and engineer who helped develop the first general purpose commercial facsimile machine for Magnavox in 1966.

Well, it was supposed to be commercial. The Magnafax “telecopier” was bulky, balky and took six minutes to transmit a single, barely legible page. Not even a marketing alliance with Xerox could save the telecopier; in four years, only around 20,000 machines were sold.

Factories in Japan now churn out that many fax machines every week--about 1 million a year--with three out of 10 destined for the United States.

Today’s fax machines are as fast, cheap and easy to use as their predecessors were slow, expensive and ornery.

Japan’s ascendance is a familiar story, but with an interesting twist. “American companies weren’t willing to make the long-term investments that were needed to succeed,” Stamps said. “They all wanted their money back in three years.”

Meanwhile, over in Japan, fax was the ideal technology for transmitting the complex Kanji language, which lacks an alphabet but features thousands of graphic characters called ideographs.

“They bought our technology, miniaturized it, perfected it,” Stamps said. “That was the ball game.”

Using a seven-step process, today’s fax machines scan documents and then digitize the image. The digital information is than translated into an audible tone that is sent across the phone lines to another fax machine.

The tone is converted back into digital information, which in turn is reconstructed into an exact duplicate of the original, and printed out--sometimes, in as little as 20 seconds per page.

Most modern fax machines can be programmed to dial frequently called numbers; others have delay mechanisms that allow the machines to call at night, when long-distance charges are lower.

Many machines also re-dial automatically until they connect to another fax machine. That can be a problem when a wrong number is programmed in.

Consider the experience of Pamela Pollace, public relations manager at Intel. One recent morning, the phone in her office rang. But instead of a human being on the other end, it was just a fax.

“There was this high-pitched tone on the other end of the line,” she recalled. “I’d hang up, but the stupid thing would keep calling every 60 seconds.” She called several acquaintances with fax machines but never managed to track down the culprit.

“I guess it’s the price we pay for technology,” she said.

‘Pretty Annoyed’

Pollace, who depends on her fax machine for vital communications, said she would be “pretty annoyed” if an advertiser tied up her machine with junk faxes. Lumber exporter Edy, noting that fax paper costs him about 10 cents a sheet, said unsolicited mail “would not only be annoying, but expensive.”

But direct-mail experts say faxed solicitations are only likely to increase. They note that most advertisements are transmitted at night--when phone rates are cheaper and recipients’ machines are likely to be idle.

More importantly, they say, the ads work. “It’s better than regular mail, because the prospect doesn’t even have to open an envelope,” said Patrick Evans, president of Evcor Systems in Chicago.

Evcor, which distributes postage meters, recently faxed ads to 1,000 businesses and got about 60 responses. “That is a 50% better response rate than we get by mail,” Evans noted.

Amazingly, all of the responses were polite.