I need help creating a thesis and an outline on The Fax Machine. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required.

I need help creating a thesis and an outline on The Fax Machine. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. Although threatened by more advanced technologies like scanners, printers, and email, the fax machine continues to dodge extinction and to remain attractive to businesses and individuals.

Fax Machine's Share in the History of Communications

Alexander Bain, a Scottish mechanic, invented the fax machine or 'facsimile' in 1843 in Britain. Bain's fax machine used a stylus attached to a pendulum that scanned an image or text on a metal surface. Bain's device was a combination of several clock parts that worked in sync with a telegraph machine. It transferred encoded image data via telegraph lines. However, this machine did not gain significant ground at the time of its inception, and people soon abandoned it due to its bulky size and limited utility. [1]

The invention of the telephone in 1876 revived the use of fax machines, which then used telephone lines for data transmission. Later on, these machines could also transmit data via radio waves. By 1924, journalists faxed photographs to foreign newspapers, and by 1955, radio fax enabled the transfer of data across continents. Newspapers and weather services were the earliest users of fax machines for transferring photographs and weather maps across the world.[2]

By 1980, telephone-based fax machines had gained immense popularity because of their reduced prices and fixed Grade 3 standards. About a million fax machines were sold in 1988 alone, and they became the fastest-selling machines adorning homes and office desktops word wide.[3]

Fax machines proved to be of immense utility to the Japanese. The Japanese alphabet has thousands of characters, and keypads can only afford a limited number of keys. Fax machines provided the Japanese with an easy way of transferring their written documents. According to the American facsimile association, about 50% of all calls made in the 1980s to the USA from Japan were fax machines.[4]

Frank Vizard, a contributing editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, has suggested that fax machines' increasing popularity blurred the line between the home and the office, as business documents could easily be faxed to homes within seconds.