If you thought the fax machine was fading away as an outdated technology in favor of emails and online discussion boards, you thought wrong.  Well, maybe not totally wrong. 

Fax machines in their conventional sense may be dwindling.  But, one guy at a multidisciplinary arts center who called me up last week has found a new use for them.  The center is planning to use two of them as part of a contemporary art display at the museum in an upcoming exhibit.

The fax machines will be placed facing  each other.  One fax machine will receive a fax, print it out, scan it, and fax it back to the other fax machine, who sent the initial fax.  Then the original fax machine will receive the fax and re-fax it to the second machine.  This loop will run continuously while the exhibit is on display. 

This action generates quite a lot of static, with the papers frequently passing through the rollers inside each machine.  As mentioned in some of our previous blog posts regarding static, roller feed applications are often stopped due to static causing the feed material to cling and create jams.  Of course, frequent jam-ups would not be a desired part of this artistic display. 

But, I was able to offer him a simple and effective solution with little to no interference with the artistic nature of the setup.  One 9″ Ion Bar mounted on each machine, each connected to our dual outlet power supply, would eliminate virtually all of the generated static, allowing the faxing back and forth to continue flawlessly throughout the exhibition.

Emily Mortimer
Application Engineer
emilymortimer@exair.com