Hi kids! Clicky here. If you have ever been in a doctor’s office, you may have heard a machine in the back go beeeep, krsssshhh, bweee-bweee-bweee. That is not a bird. I would know. That is a fax machine, and it is singing a song to another fax machine far away.
A fax machine turns a piece of paper into sound. It looks at the page one thin line at a time, from the top to the bottom, and for each line it says “white, white, white, black, black, white” in a very fast squeaky language. The fax machine at the other end listens and draws the same dots on its own paper. That is how your X-ray report travels from one clinic to another without anyone having to drive it there.
You might ask, “Why do doctors still use a machine that sings, when we have email?” That is the best question anyone has asked in Clicky’s Corner. The answer is that fax machines were already in every doctor’s office before email was invented, and once everybody has a thing, nobody wants to be the first to stop having it. Grown-ups call this “interoperability.” Kids call it “because that’s how we’ve always done it,” which is the same thing but shorter.
The beginning of the song is the two machines saying hello and agreeing how fast to sing. If one machine is old and slow, the fast one slows down to match it, which is very polite. Fax machines are the politest machines in the building. The printer is the rudest. Everybody knows this.
Activity: Next time you hear a fax machine, try to sing along. You will not be able to. Nobody can. Zuper Micro Man can, but he does not like to show off.
Clicky’s fun fact: Sometimes a fax arrives with page 48 blank. That is not your fault. It is a known issue.