tThere’s not much that Dolly Parton and Northern railroad bosses can claim to have in common. Frustrated commuters from Manchester to Middlesbrough might complain that the train service barely runs from 9 to 5. What unites them is that neither of them can put down the fax machine.
Banned by the NHS in England and abandoned by the Premier League after too many player transfers fell apart amid faulty transmissions, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham this week blamed the persistence of the squeaky, buzzing fax machine on the misery of the travelers.
Thunder-faced after half an hour listening to Northern executives explain the dismal performance of their service, he said, “I hear they’re still using fax machines… Is it possible that’s true?”
It was, the bosses admitted. A quarter of a century after email took hold and 40 years since fax became ubiquitous, in 2024 train crew rosters and processing are still done by fax, they explained. Burnham could hardly believe it. There was a time when faxes delivered big news: Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA in 1995 (“I’m back,” he faxed) or save-the-date invitations to Prince William and Kate’s wedding in 2011. But This was a source of shame. The use of the fax was a sign of “contempt for the traveling public,” Burnham fumed.
“It looks like the rail industry will get down to business when the time comes, when the faxes come,” he said.
There are fax machines in the collections of the Science Museum in London and the Smithsonian in Washington, but Northern is not alone in keeping their use alive.
Country superstar Parton refuses to text and sticks to faxes, even when texting her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus, who sometimes has someone scan the fax and text it to her. Dozens of fax machines were still working in hospitals in Wales, responses to freedom of information requests from 2022 showed. In Germany, a quarter of companies still frequently use the fax machine, according to a survey published in July. fax and these devices are used in many German hospitals. “Faxophile” Japanese officials also still use them, citing a lower risk of piracy thanks to technology that converts a stream of sounds into pulses of ink.
Jason Fitzpatrick, who runs the Gadget Museum in Suffolk and has a collection of 40 fax machines, said their use was part of a broader persistence of outdated technology in places like the subway, where “there are computers that have been working since the 1970s.” and they are so complex and custom-designed that it is difficult to eliminate them.” Some military systems are still supported by computers that date back decades, he added.
The railway operator’s fax admission illustrates the current extreme variation in technological progress. This week, Elon Musk claimed that artificial intelligence “will be able to do anything that any human being can do, possibly within a year or two.” And yet, a railway group that transports 85 million passengers a year continues to depend on technology that has long been surpassed by computers.
Guardian readers haven’t completely abandoned technology either. One still sends faxes to her aunt, who is over 100 years old.
“His arthritis makes it difficult for him to text with the fiddly little buttons on his cell phone, and the same goes for his hearing and the phone, so we fax missives to each other instead,” he said. “We write chatty messages, but she writes by hand in large capital letters and wastes very few words. “I think she feels a little left out now that most organizations don’t have fax numbers.”
Another reader, who worked at a utility company, said: “When there is a problem with the internet, it is used as an emergency measure to secure last-minute wholesale energy deals. When the old thing starts up, it scares the hell out of the poor woman sitting next to it.”
In 2018, then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock ordered fax machines removed from the NHS, calling the technology “archaic” and stating that “everyone else got rid of them years ago”. NHS England does not know whether Hancock’s order, which states: “we do not collect data on the number of fax machines”, was followed.
after newsletter promotion
Phil Collins is perhaps one of the most famous fax users after it was erroneously reported that he had said he had divorced his wife by fax in 1996.
“I was in Frankfurt and I sent him a fax because the phone kept breaking down,” he told an interviewer in 2016. “I was arranging time to see the kids and mentioned the fact that (the marriage) was over, but it was translated while I ended our relationship by fax. I don’t know how that got into the papers. Well, I kind of do. “I have never asked him.”
Last year, Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, announced that providing fax lines would no longer be the responsibility of British Telecom. Killing the fax, he said:
“Unless you have moved house or are the agent of a footballer, or even the agent of a footballer who has moved house, you may not have had much reason to use a fax machine in recent years” .
But even football agents have largely stopped using faxes, which had the advantage of allowing quick and accurate contract exchanges. The final straw appeared to be the fax error that reportedly thwarted David de Gea’s transfer from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2015. The Premier League moved to online registration applications in December 2018.
