Explainer Hub on Instagram: "Long before the internet, photos were still shared across countries — just in a much smarter mechanical way. In the 1930s, newspapers used a system called wired photo transmission. A photograph was placed into a special scanning machine that slowly read the image line by line. Light and dark areas were converted into electrical signals and sent through telephone or telegraph wires. At the other end, a receiving machine recreated the image by translating those signals