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ISSUE 064 · FUN FACTS · USELESS BUT FASCINATING

Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker, patented a machine for sending images down a wire in 1843. A pendulum swept across a raised metal surface at one end; a synchronised pendulum at the other marked chemically treated paper wherever the first had touched metal. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876. The fax beat it to the patent office by thirty-three years.

And not only on paper. In 1865, an Italian priest and physicist named Giovanni Caselli had a refined version — the pantelegraph — running as a public service. France licensed it, and for several years you could hand a document in your own handwriting to an office in Paris and have a recognisable copy of it emerge in Lyon. The line was later extended to Marseille and handled thousands of transmissions. A commercial fax service was operating eleven years before the telephone was patented.

It then lost, for reasons that have nothing to do with the idea being wrong. The machines had to be clock-synchronised to an uncomfortable degree of precision. They were slow. The telegraph operators whose work they threatened were unenthusiastic. The French service closed around 1870, caught up in the Franco-Prussian War. Photoelectric scanning — the fax as anyone now pictures it — arrived separately in the early 1900s, and the machine only became standard office furniture in the 1980s, nearly a century and a half after Bain's patent.

In fairness, Caselli's device was not a fax machine in the modern sense. It read a raised metal surface, not a page of ordinary ink. But it did the job a fax does — document in one end, copy out the other, down a wire — and it did it for paying customers while the telephone was still a decade from existing.

David Warren was nine years old in 1934 when his father boarded an airliner crossing Bass Strait and the aircraft vanished. Almost nothing was recovered. No cause was ever established. Among the last things his father gave him was a crystal radio set.

Nineteen years later Warren was a chemist at Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, assigned to the committee investigating the Comet disasters — the world's first jet airliner, breaking apart in mid-air with nothing for investigators to work from. He had recently seen one of the first pocket recorders at a trade fair, and the connection he made was a simple one: if someone had recorded the cockpit, nobody would be guessing.

The 1954 memo in which he proposed the device was ignored for four years. Aviation authorities saw no need for it. Pilots' associations objected to being recorded — the surviving complaint is that it would mean a spy flying alongside you — and the air force suggested it would yield more expletives than explanations. A visiting British official happened to see the prototype in 1958, understood it at once, and flew Warren to England, where it was taken seriously immediately. Britain and the United States mandated recorders through the 1960s. Australia got there first, after a crash at Mackay in 1960.

The colour was never black. Recorders are painted international orange for the only reason that matters: somebody has to find the thing, usually in water or wreckage or both. A modern unit sits inside a steel or titanium shell and is built to survive an impact of several thousand times the force of gravity and an hour in a fire at eleven hundred degrees Celsius. Where the name came from is genuinely disputed — wartime British slang for any sealed instrument, the blackened interiors of the earliest film-based units, and plain journalistic shorthand all have their advocates. What is not in dispute is that it has never described the paint.

Warren was formally honoured by Australia in 2002, nearly half a century after the memo nobody wanted. When he died in 2010, his coffin carried a label: Flight Recorder Inventor — Do Not Open.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto on 23 September 1889, hand-painting hanafuda — flower cards — for the Japanese playing-card market. The Wright brothers got off the ground at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903. By then the company was fourteen. It is older than the Model T, older than the Tokyo subway, older than sliced bread, and older than the entire concept of commercial aviation.

The early business was rather less wholesome than the modern brand suggests. Hanafuda had grown up around gambling, and the Japanese card trade ran close to — and sometimes straight through — organised crime. Nintendo's founding customers were parlours operating at the edge of the law. The company spent its first several decades supplying a mildly disreputable industry.

Then comes the part everyone cites as a lesson in reinvention, which is worth looking at honestly. Hiroshi Yamauchi took over in 1949 at twenty-two and spent the 1960s trying nearly anything: instant rice, a taxi company, a vacuum cleaner, a chain of love hotels. All of it failed. What survived was a toy division and, in 1974, a deal to distribute an American games console in Japan.

A hundred and thirty-seven years in business, fewer than fifty of them spent doing the thing anyone now associates with the name. The moral usually drawn is that pivoting works. The more accurate one is that most of Nintendo's pivots failed, and the company simply stayed solvent long enough for one of them not to.

The fax: Alexander Bain's 1843 British patent for an electric printing telegraph; Frederick Bakewell's 1848 improvement, demonstrated at the Great Exhibition of 1851; Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph and the French state fax service running from 1865, per standard histories of telegraphy; Bell's US telephone patent, 1876.

The flight recorder: Australian Defence Science and Technology accounts of David Warren's work at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories; Warren's 1954 memorandum proposing a cockpit recording device; obituaries in The Age and The Telegraph, 2010; current crash-survivability requirements for flight recorders under international aviation standards.

Nintendo: the company's own corporate history, including its 1889 founding and 1974 console distribution deal; David Sheff, Game Over (1993); obituaries of Hiroshi Yamauchi, 2013.

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