Fax initially was used to transmit writing when the code space was too large. It was huge in Asia before it became popular in the West, because at the time ther

Fax initially was used to transmit writing when the code space was too large. It was huge in Asia before it became popular in the West, because at the time there was too small a Morse Code (or other telegraph encoding) code space to capture many Asian languages. I believe they used a wax cylinder and a make-or-break stylus switch. The cylinder rotated, the stylus progressed down the image in a slow spiral fashion, dropping into the grooves the author had made in the wax. The signal was used on the other end in a similar apparatus with a pen, which would make marks when the stylus dropped into a wax divot (part of a letter) and raise the pen when no mark was detected. The resulting image was a sort of raster-scan of the original.