History of Scanners

History of Scanners

Pantelegraph

            Modern scanners are considered the successors of early telephotography and fax input devices.

           The pantelegraph (Italian: pantelegrafo; French: pantélégraphe) was an early form of facsimile machine transmitting over normal telegraph lines developed by Giovanni Caselli, used commercially in the 1860s, that was the first such device to enter practical service. It used electromagnets to drive and synchronize movement of pendulums at the source and the distant location, to scan and reproduce images. It could transmit handwriting, signatures, or drawings within an area of up to 150 x 100mm.

            Édouard Belin's Belinograph of 1913, scanned using a photocell and transmitted over ordinary phone lines, formed the basis for the AT&T Wirephoto service. In Europe, services similar to a wirephoto were called a Belino. It was used by news agencies from the 1920s to the mid-1990s, and consisted of a rotating drum with a single photodetector at a standard

Caselli's pantelegraph machanism

speed of 60 or 120 rpm (later models up to 240 rpm). They send a linear analog AM signal through standard telephone voice lines to receptors, which synchronously print the proportional intensity on special paper. Color photos were sent as three separated RGB filtered images consecutively, but only for special events due to transmission costs.

Belinograph BEP2V wirephoto machine by Edouard Belin 1930