The first fax-machine patent came the same year as A Christmas Carol.

Fax machines feel like late-office technology. A Christmas Carol feels firmly Victorian. The overlap is real. Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a British patent for electrically transmitting copied images in 1843. That same year, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol was published in London. The clunky office fax came much later, but the core idea was already being patented while Dickens's ghosts were first reaching readers. The weird part is not that Dickens had a fax machine; it is that the invention's roots are that old. Office tech has a Victorian shadow.

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