History
The fax machine was patented more than 30 years before the telephone.
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an electric printing telegraph in 1843 that could transmit images over wires. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent came in 1876.
Why is this true?
Early fax machines used pendulums and chemically treated paper and never caught on commercially. It took until the 1980s, and cheap electronics, for fax to become an office standard.
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More about history
History keeps producing facts that ruin your sense of time. A war shorter than a lunch break, an empire that overlaps with the invention of the fax machine, a queen who lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. The entries here favour events with solid documentation, and each one explains the context that makes the surprise make sense rather than leaving it as a bare curiosity.