Chapter 248 A new era of fax

Dashi Country, Liusha City, the second laboratory, which is the mechanical laboratory.

A rather complex-looking machine is placed on the workbench, with several thick cables connected to the back.

There were a series of strange sounds coming from inside the machine, and a piece of paper placed on a copper plate slowly spit out.

Zheng Fuguang carefully picked up the copper plate and took a look at it, then turned to Zhu Jingyuan beside him:

"Your Highness, the reaction has been completed. The effect can only be said to be very good, the speed is also very fast, and the clarity is acceptable.

"Your algorithm is really good. In the future, photos and important document reports provided for newspapers can be directly sent to 'fax'.

"Theoretically, faxes are completely synchronized, and the information on the originator and receiver is exactly the same, and can even be used as evidence."

Zhu Jingyuan picked up the piece of paper and looked at it. On it was a black and white photo of the Yamen of the Ministry of Industry of the Capital.

At first glance, it looks like an ordinary photo.

But if you look closely at it, you will find that the images are not whole, but composed of small dots.

Different points have different color depths, ultimately forming a rather realistic photo.

Bitmap image fax.

Zhu Jingyuan’s new invention.

The Ministry of Industry of the Capital completed the principle exploration and practical verification, completed the prototype machine production and the experiment was successful, and then sent the data to the mechanical laboratory of the Food Country.

The Mechanical Laboratory produced the same machine and then connected it to the Ministry of Industry of the Ming Dynasty to receive this photo fax for testing.

The world already has fax technology, but it is cumbersome and costly to use.

The development technology is a chemical mode similar to that used by a camera to develop photos, transmitting and printing all the contents of the entire picture.

It will only be used unless it is particularly important information and images must be transmitted.

For example, the photos of Zhu Jingyuan's first appearance in the Western Cape were sent back to newspapers in various countries in Europe and America using traditional faxes.

Although Zhu Jingyuan was confused as to why his photos were considered particularly important information, that was exactly what they did.

Other ordinary messages are basically text telegrams, explaining the problem in words.

The "lattice" design provided by Zhu Jingyuan historically appeared in the 1920s.

After dividing images and text into lattice, the actual amount of data that needs to be transmitted is reduced.

The most critical thing is that complex images and text with human intelligence information can be turned into simple and regular mechanical data.

By converting mechanical data into electrical signals, they can be sent directly to the other side of the world through cables, and then similar equipment can be used to reproduce the original form.

Dot matrix technology is the basis for the true popularization of fax equipment and the basis for all types of automated printers in future generations.

Even the basic technology for all subsequent text-image devices.

The dot matrix design has been used throughout the entire fax era and the entire information age.

From now on, in the era that Zhu Jingyuan can think about, this kind of design will never be outdated.

All the information I saw in my previous life, as long as it was printed or displayed on the screen, was basically processed through dot matrixing.

The most rogue patent that Zhu Jingyuan knew in his previous life was "displaying text and images on an LCD screen through a dot matrix".

Zhu Jingyuan looked at the photo in his hand and nodded slightly:

"The problem of images is solved in this way, and it can be extended to the processing and transmission of text.

"According to a standard, commonly used Chinese characters are converted into lattice.

"Text is much simpler than images, and correct text can be expressed with very few points.

"The cost of sending text faxes should be further reduced in the future.

"Use electrical signals to transmit text dot matrix data to the other end, and print the text directly at the other end.

"This way we don't have to write in the telegraph operator's hand... we don't have to... um..."

At this point in Zhu Jingyuan's words, he had already discovered the problem.

The telegrams that Zhu Jingyuan often saw were directly handwritten by the telegraph operator, rather than printed content.

Zhu Jingyuan subconsciously felt that this was written by hand after the telegraph operator received the telegraph code and translated it at the same time.

Therefore, Zhu Jingyuan subconsciously thought that with the text matrix fax, the cost of text faxing would be reduced, and the telegraph operator would no longer need to translate manually.

Connect the fax signal directly to the typing machine, and let the machine print out the content directly according to the signal.

However, the use of code plus translation is primarily for encryption.

Then, even if a mechanical computer can be made to directly decrypt, there is no machine in this era that can directly print Chinese characters.

Finally, even if there is a machine that prints Chinese characters or other characters, it is not dot matrix.

The traditional mechanical typewriter is essentially a real-time movable type printing machine.

Essentially, single-character seals are used to print characters.

Standardizing the Chinese character dot matrix is ​​actually an advanced requirement that will only appear in the computer age, even after the advent of laser phototypesetting, or when monitors are made.

Before this, simply for typing text, there was no need to create a standard lattice of Chinese characters.

In addition, this linkage plan or the idea itself, this kind of planning that will be taken for granted in later generations, in the current era, every link is whimsical, and at the same time, there are always difficult problems.

Not to mention the system difficulty of linking these devices, the automatic typewriter itself presents huge difficulties.

Typewriters were not popular in the Ming Dynasty, not only because the literati in the Ming Dynasty preferred writing, but also because Chinese character typewriters were too difficult to make.

Mechanical typewriters have been basically popular among the imperial courts and large enterprises in various countries in Europe and America in the past decade or so.

Most countries in Thailand and Spain use alphabetic scripts, which usually only have twenty or thirty letters in total.

Each letter is placed on a metal strip, and a metal strip is connected to a button.

Just like piano keys, when you press a key, the corresponding metal bar lifts up.

The head of the metal strip can be used to print a letter pattern like a seal by smashing the ribbon on the white paper.

Twenty or thirty letters, twenty or thirty keys, and twenty or thirty metal bars can solve the typewriter problem.

The structural principle of alphabetic typewriters is so simple that mature typewriters can even be made "portable".

Chinese characters are ideographic characters, and each single character is actually equivalent to a word composed of multiple letters from various countries in Thailand and Spain.

There are thousands of commonly used Chinese characters and tens of thousands of standard Chinese characters. If you include various variants, no one knows how many there are.

Just like the number of words in various countries in Thailand and Spain is also very large, and it is still growing.

Even if these Chinese characters are used to filter commonly used characters, they cannot be printed on a typewriter as easily as the Thai and Western alphabet.

In Zhu Jingyuan's previous life, the fact that Chinese characters could not be easily made into a typewriter was once a reason for some people to call for abandoning Chinese characters and switching to Latin alphabet pinyin.

This incident made European and American intellectuals laugh at it and drew various cartoons to ridicule it.

This may make the masters of certain eras feel inferior.

But the Ming people in this world don't seem to care about this matter.

The unique Chinese characters can better reflect the uniqueness of the cultural personality of the Ming Dynasty.

Calligraphy, which is rich in meaning and usage and can be regarded as an art, is highly praised by Thai and Western intellectuals.

Even if someone occasionally criticizes the inconvenience of Chinese characters in mechanical printing, there is no need for Ming people to defend and align themselves.

Intellectuals in Western Europe who like Ming culture can scold such people out of the circle.

"If you feel bad about it, it must be because you don't understand appreciation."

According to Zhu Jingyuan's experience, a relatively flexible Chinese character typewriter can actually be made.

Before the advent of laser phototypesetting technology, and after the advent of electronic computers, if you wanted to use computer control to directly type Chinese characters, you needed to create a structure for printing Chinese characters.

This structure was also purely mechanical in the early days, and it was a machinist's Chinese character typewriter.

That was something that was developed in the late 1940s, just after World War II.

Make this structure independently and design a set of encoding rules similar to the input method to enable typing.

Connected to the mechanical computer and fax machine signals, it should be possible to print out the fax analyzed by the computer.

But considering the complexity of the entire system and the difficulty of achieving these functions with purely mechanical structures...

Zhu Jingyuan felt that the entire system might not be able to run smoothly even after ten or eight years of effort.

So Zhu Jingyuan stopped when he said this.

Zheng Fuguang and the craftsmen here were also obviously stunned for a moment, as if they were trying hard to digest Zhu Jingyuan's idea.

"Your Highness, this idea of ​​yours is really unimaginable. If it can be realized, it will be very convenient.

“However, the difficulty of realizing it... now seems to be undoubtedly very high.

"This requires the use of automatic computer decryption, linkage of fax machines and typewriters, and controlled automatic typewriters...

"We craftsmen probably can't solve this kind of project.
To be continued...