When Marty McFly gets fired in Back to the Future Part II, his boss delivers the news by video call. Then the house starts printing it.
Fax machines in several rooms spit out the same blunt sheet: YOU'RE FIRED!!! Jennifer takes one from a fax mounted beside the toilet. The flying cars may still be negotiating with the insurance industry, but the bathroom fax has become the film's most charmingly wrong prediction.
Today is Back to the Future Day, named for October 21, 2015, the date Marty and Doc visit. The movie was released on November 22, 1989. From that side of the calendar, a fax in every room did not look nearly as foolish as it does now.
Fax was having a magnificent 1980s. A Washington Post report published in 1988 said US shipments had jumped from 187,500 machines in 1986 to 417,200 in 1987. Dataquest projected 785,000 shipments for 1988 and 2.2 million by 1992. Prices were falling, documents crossed ordinary phone lines in minutes, and roughly one percent of American homes already had one. The same report mentioned people installing faxes at home so they could keep working after hours, which history has certainly improved by removing the paper.
Co-writer Bob Gale later gave the simple explanation: "From where we were sitting in 1989, it just seemed like there were going to be more and more faxes." He called it a complete miss. The designers were not casually scattering office junk around the set, either. Edward Eyth, who designed much of the McFly home technology, said the fax machines of his day were bulky and noisy, so he imagined smaller, sleeker, wall-mounted versions.
That is how a great deal of futurism works: take the fastest-rising object in the room, make it thinner, and give everybody three. The prediction can be careful and still fail because the important invention is not the improved object. It is the thing that makes the object unnecessary.
The timing here is almost unfair. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989, but CERN says the first browser and server were not running until the end of 1990. The software reached colleagues in 1991 and internet newsgroups that August. While a film crew was trying to furnish 2015, the technology that would rearrange communication was still a proposal at a physics laboratory.
The fax also got something right. Marty receives a written message from work, immediately, at home, on multiple devices. The movie missed the smartphone, but it understood that being reachable everywhere would let the office follow you everywhere. A bathroom printer seems absurd. A work notification beside the toilet does not.
Predictions age best when we ask what job the prop was doing, not whether we still own the prop. The fax promised speed, permanence, and remote authority. We kept all three. We merely arranged for the message to glow on a screen, and saved the paper for something less humiliating.