If you’ve ever checked your digital watch or had the distinct displeasure of receiving a fax in the year of our Lord 2026, you’ve got me to thank or blame.
Being a pioneer mostly comprised of cold porridge, bad investments and people trying to steal your homework but not mine at school because I wasn't exactly the teacher’s pet. School was a place where I sat quietly, staring at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight and my teachers thought I was a bit dense.
I was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick and it was there, amidst the rhythmic tick-tock of brass gears and the smell of lubricating oil, that I decided everything was too slow. Why wait for a winding key to do the work? Why not use electricity? It seemed like a bright idea and little did I know, the path to glory is paved with people who insist you should stick to your day job.
I eventually found myself in London, on Hanover Street, running a workshop but innovation is expensive and electricity wasn’t exactly something you could pick up at the corner grocer's in the 1840s.
In my desperation, I sought out Sir Charles Wheatstone and I showed him my electric clock which was a beautiful, elegant piece of machinery kept in perpetual, pulsing motion by electromagnetic impulses but he dismissed it and said there was no future in electric clocks but three months later, I’m reading the paper and lo and behold, Wheatstone is at the Royal Society, unveiling his invention, the electric clock and I thought that claiming a patent you saw in someone else’s workshop three months prior is a level of chutzpah that even I have to begrudgingly respect.
Wheatstone didn't count on one thing, I was Scottish and we are famously stubborn when it comes to being cheated out of money.
He tried to block my patents but the House of Lords, in a rare moment of clarity, summoned me to give evidence and I walked into that room and explained how electricity actually functioned, and watched as Wheatstone’s face turned the color of a curdled porridge.
He was forced to pay me £10,000 and i put that money towards another invention, the Fax Machine or as i called it, the Chemical Telegraph.
I didn’t invent the fax machine so that you could send a blurry, black-and-white copy of an insurance document, I invented it because I thought we should be able to send images over wires! It was the 1840s! It was basically magic!
I spent three years tinkering with the synchronisation of pendulums and the chemical reaction on paper. It worked. It was genius. And yet, looking back, I realize I was the first person in history to inflict this machine upon the world.
The thing about being an inventor is that your brain is wired for discovery, not for the stock market and my fortune didn't last after I invested in some ventures that were, to put it mildly, optimistic, less mildly, just plain stupid.
I died with considerably less than I started with, and yet, I don’t regret it because I see you all now, walking around with your mobile devices, sending instant messages, peering at screens, and tracking time to the millisecond which are all descendants of my pendulums and my wires.
So, next time your clock ticks, or your fax machine screams at you for no reason, spare a thought for Alexander Bain. I may have died broke, but I certainly didn't die bored.
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