Which came first, the fax machine or television?

the fax machine came first, by 82 years. Alexander Bain patented an electric printing telegraph that sent images.

Side by side

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.

television

John Logie Baird transmitted a recognisable moving image of a ventriloquist's dummy in October 1925 using a mechanical spinning-disc system. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated fully electronic television in 1927, and it was that approach, not Baird's, that every subsequent television used. Regular public broadcasting began in 1936, which means television is younger than the talking film and older than the ballpoint pen.