Just The Fax, Ma'am

By Thomas McCarroll/New York

Just before an appearance last month at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, the renowned Crosby, Stills and Nash decided that they wanted to perform an old Bob Dylan tune, Ballad of Hollis Brown. But the rock group needed the sheet music for the song, and the most accessible copies were at the Secaucus, N.J., offices of Warner Bros. Publications. The group telephoned Warner Vice President Sy Feldman, who asked if the performers had access to a fax machine. Luckily, one of those electronic wonders was available at their hotel. In the time that it takes to sing the ballad, the band had copies of it in their hands. They performed the song in both shows that night.

From office workers to rock stars, more and more people are answering yes to the question, Do you have a fax? A fax, short for facsimile machine, sends electronic copies of documents over ordinary telephone lines to a fax on the opposite end. Once considered too bulky and costly to be practical, fax machines have shrunk to half the size of personal computers and dropped sharply in price, to less than $1,000 for one model. As a result, fax sales in the U.S. are expected to rise from 250,000 machines this year to 400,000 by 1990, pushing the industry's annual revenues from $700 million to the magic $1 billion mark.

A fax is part paper copier and part telephone. On one end, a document is fed into the machine. The operator then uses the built-in telephone to dial the phone number of the receiving fax. When contact is made, an electronic scanner is activated. As it moves across the page, it converts the text, charts and pictures into electrical pulses that are carried over the telephone line. On the receiving end, the process is reversed. The machines can transmit everything from design plans to a picture of the Mona Lisa, in black-and-white at least.

Fax meets the needs of all sorts of users. Dime Savings Bank of New York uses them to verify signatures on checks and important documents. The Los Angeles Clippers basketball team sends game scores and players' statistics to newspapers by fax. Edward Scripps, chairman of the Scripps League Newspapers chain, carries one wherever he goes, even aboard his company yacht, the Eagle Mar, so that he can send suggestions for editorials to his publishers.

The appeal of fax is speed and cost. Federal Express charges about $12 to deliver a one-page letter overnight. The same letter can be faxed in a matter of seconds for less than 50 cents. Telex also pales by comparison. To telex a document, a keyboard operator must retype it at a computer terminal before sending it to its destination. This can take an hour or more and cost about $5 for 50 words. With a fax, people can simply send a "picture" of the text. Says Mark Winther, an electronics analyst at Manhattan-based Link Resources: "The growth of fax is coming out of the hides of Federal Express and Western Union. Fax poses a serious threat to overnight express mail, and it could make telex obsolete."

Modern facsimile dates back to World War II, when the military used slow, crude devices to transmit maps, orders and weather charts. Such companies as 3M and Xerox introduced the machines into the office for $10,000 and up. But fax did not become commercially successful until the 1980s, when Japanese companies developed better machines by replacing mechanical parts with sophisticated computer circuitry. That cut transmission time for a page from six minutes to ten seconds, and copy quality improved dramatically. Moreover, a fax no longer hogs office floor space. Most fit on desktops. Mitsubishi Electric has introduced a unit that fits under a car dashboard.

The biggest reduction, though, has been in the price. The typical machine today costs less than $3,000. Sharp Electronics recently unveiled a compact fax that doubles as an ordinary telephone for only $900. Prices could fall to $500 by year's end, putting the devices within reach of the mass market. Ultimately, fax machines could become as common as personal computers, or even telephones.