Compatibility helps everyone: Jonathan Coopersmith on standards for technology

What do fax machines have in common with electric cars? More than you may think. History professor Jonathan Coopersmith, who studied the development of fax technology, argues in this March 2017 essay in The Conversation that in order for electric cars to eventually succeed, competing electric car makers need to follow the example of fax development and adopt uniform charging standards. (In case you aren’t familiar with them, fax machines were once key business communication tools, allowing a printed document to be fed into a machine and transmitted over telephone lines; a similar machine on the other end of the call would receive a facsimile of the original document—hence, “fax”.)

Read it here: Coopersmith, "What fax machines can teach us about electric cars”