You can look at the history of the fax machine. There were primitive fax machines very early, but they were a bit cumbersome, but more importantly nobody needed

You can look at the history of the fax machine. There were primitive fax machines very early, but they were a bit cumbersome, but more importantly nobody needed to send documents that fast anyway. It was easy and normal to send a guy on a horse, and for business purposes at the time, that was more than fast enough, for the distances that were being covered by the first fax lines.