In 1937 a black and white movie described the latest invention: Transfering photos by wire. It truly was a complicated setup involving mechanical rotors and neon tubes, but it worked. Flash forward to 1923, and I am simply attaching this picture to a toot.
@randahl Yes, facsimile and then radiofacsimile. We ham radio operators can still use the original protocols and timing. Nowadays we use computers to produce and decode the audio tones, and display it on the screen, but some have resurrected the mechanical versions. It's slow but it works well enough. Images from the moon during the Apollo program were sent the same way.
Building on this, hams developed slow-scan television which is the same thing but in color. It was popular in the 1970s and 80s.
Newspaper photos were sent by this method into the 1960s. If you're old like me, you'll remember seeing "Wirephoto" in the caption of many newspaper photos.
