A closer look
German inventor Rudolf Hell essentially created the unholy offspring of a fax machine and a teleprinter in 1929, appropriately named the Hellschreiber. Instead of sending binary character codes that could easily get garbled by static, this absolute unit sliced text into vertical columns of pixels and transmitted them as analog audio tones. When printed by the receiver, the text appeared as a continuous ticker tape of dot-matrix letters. Because the human eye is great at reading smudged garbage, the text remained completely legible even through horrific wartime radio interference, solving a digital problem with analog ingenuity.
