Which came first, the bicycle or the fax machine?

the bicycle came first, by 26 years. Karl Drais rode his running machine near Mannheim.

Side by side

the bicycle

The first two-wheeler you could balance and steer was Drais's laufmaschine of 1817, which had no pedals — you pushed with your feet. Pedals arrived in the 1860s, the chain-driven safety bicycle with equal wheels in 1885, and the pneumatic tyre in 1888. The bicycle is younger than the steam locomotive, younger than photography's first experiments, and roughly contemporary with the stethoscope.

the fax machine

Bain's 1843 patent covered a device that scanned a raised metal image with a stylus and reproduced it at the far end of a wire — a fax machine in principle. Giovanni Caselli ran a commercial pantelegraph service between Paris and Lyon from 1865, sending signatures and handwriting eleven years before Bell patented the telephone. The fax is not merely older than the telephone; it is older than the American Civil War.