On 27 May 1843, the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain was granted British Patent No. 9745 for what he called an electric printing telegraph: a device that used synchronised pendulums to scan a flat metal surface and reproduce its markings, line by line, at a receiving station over a telegraph wire. The patent describes the basic working principle of a fax machine. Bain had invented one. The same year, Charles Dickens was publishing A Christmas Carol, Queen Victoria was six years into her reign, and Alexander Graham Bell, the eventual inventor of the telephone, was minus 4 years old. The fax machine predates the telephone by more than three decades.
The corresponding window of chronological overlap produces one of the more peculiar facts about nineteenth-century technology. The fax existed from 1843. Abraham Lincoln lived until 1865. The Japanese samurai class, despite the popular impression of belonging to a distant feudal past, was still a recognised legal caste in Japanese society throughout Lincoln’s lifetime and was not formally dismantled until well into the 1870s. There was, therefore, a 22-year window — from 1843, the patent of Bain’s machine, until Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 — during which a samurai could, in theory, have sent a fax to the sitting president of the United States. As a Truth or Fiction analysis of the popular version of this claim documents, the fact has circulated as an internet meme since July 2021 and the underlying chronology checks out, with the kind of practical qualifications that the word “theoretically” exists to cover.
Alexander Bain’s machine
According to Britannica’s biography of Alexander Bain, Bain’s invention came less than seven years after Samuel Morse had patented the electric telegraph. Bain was a clockmaker who had already patented the world’s first electric clock in 1841, and his fax machine grew directly out of his clockwork expertise. The patent describes a system in which two pendulums, one at the transmitting station and one at the receiving station, are synchronised by an electric clock and made to scan their respective metal surfaces line by line. According to HowStuffWorks’s history of the fax machine, the transmitting station’s metal surface was covered with raised metal type. As the pendulum’s stylus passed over the type, it closed an electrical circuit, sending a pulse down the telegraph wire. At the receiving station, the pulse caused a corresponding stylus to mark a piece of chemically treated paper that had been impregnated with a solution. The marks built up, line by line, into a reproduction of the original document.
Bain’s machine was rudimentary by modern standards. The pendulums drifted out of synchronisation, the printed images were faint, and the transmission speed was slow. But it worked, and the principle was sound. The Englishman Frederick Bakewell improved on it in 1848 with a rotating cylinder, and the Italian Giovanni Caselli took the technology to commercial maturity in 1865 with his pantelegraph, which operated a regular commercial fax service between Paris and Lyon between 1865 and 1870. Several thousand documents were transmitted over Caselli’s system, including business correspondence and the signatures on financial instruments. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated as president in 1861, fax technology was no longer experimental. It was a working communications medium in commercial use in Europe.
Why the samurai had not yet been abolished
The popular image of the samurai as a figure from medieval Japan obscures the fact that the samurai class survived until well into the modern industrial era. The transition began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and restored imperial rule, but the dismantling of the samurai class itself was a gradual process that played out over the following decade. According to KCP International’s overview of the abolition of the samurai class, the relevant landmarks were the 1871 abolition of the han domain system, the 1873 Conscription Ordinance that ended the samurai’s military monopoly by establishing a Western-style national army, and the 1876 Haitōrei Edict that prohibited the samurai from carrying their characteristic two-sword set in public. The 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, led by the disaffected samurai Saigō Takamori, was the last armed resistance to the new order, and its defeat marks the practical end of the samurai as a political force.
For the full duration of Lincoln’s life and presidency, none of this had yet happened. When Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865, the Tokugawa shogunate was still nominally in power, the samurai were still the legally recognised warrior class, and the Boshin War that would dismantle the old regime was still three years away. The viral meme’s specific date of 1867 is an approximation of when the Meiji process began, rather than when the samurai class actually ended, but the broader point holds: the samurai class as a feudal institution was still intact throughout the Lincoln presidency, and the chronological overlap with the fax-machine patent is real.
What “theoretically” is doing
The word “theoretically” in the popular framing of the fact is doing important work. The fax machine existed. The samurai existed. Lincoln existed. All three overlapped in time. What did not exist, during this same window, was the infrastructure that would have been required for an actual transmission. Bain’s machine, like every 19th-century fax system, required a continuous telegraph wire connecting the sending and receiving stations.
Japan did not have a working domestic telegraph network until 1869, four years after Lincoln’s death. The first transpacific telegraph cable connecting Japan to North America was not completed until 1906. A samurai in Japan attempting to fax Washington in 1864 would have faced the immediate problem that there was no wire connecting his country to anything beyond its shores. The technology of the fax existed. The wires necessary to use it across an ocean did not.
The qualification extends further than people who have not looked into it tend to assume. According to a History.com account of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, the first cable was completed in August 1858, with Queen Victoria sending the inaugural message to President James Buchanan on 16 August, but the cable failed within weeks and went silent. A second attempt in 1865 broke during the laying and was abandoned. The first reliable, continuously-operating transatlantic telegraph cable was not in service until 27 July 1866 — more than a year after Lincoln’s assassination. For the full duration of Lincoln’s presidency, from March 1861 to April 1865, no electric signal could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean by any means. All communication between Europe and North America during the American Civil War travelled by ship, taking roughly two weeks each way. A samurai in Paris with full access to Caselli’s pantelegraph and the entire European telegraph network of 1864 would still have been unable to send a fax to Washington. The wire to do so did not exist.
The chronology, in other words, is more concrete than it sounds, and the impossibility of the actual transmission is more concrete still. Bain’s 1843 patent is a real document. The samurai’s continued legal existence through the 1860s is a real fact. Lincoln’s presidency overlapped both. The 22-year window in which all three coexisted is the kind of fact that resists easy mental categorisation, because the popular images of “samurai” and “fax machine” sit in mental boxes that do not normally touch. The boxes touched, briefly, in the middle of the nineteenth century. They just happened to do so on opposite sides of an ocean that, for the duration of the overlap, no electric signal could yet cross.
