ANY GOOD FAXES LATELY?
The media: Paul Johnson finds new technology alarming but indispensible
TECHNOLOGY is transforming the lives of journalists, especially freelance writers like myself. Not that journalists have any affection for new gadgets. While constantly exhorting readers to embrace novelty in any form, they are most reluctant to accept it themselves. If Hazlitt, the greatest of all, were alive today, I doubt if he would even use a typewriter. As such he would be in good company. Many people still believe You can't write 'properly' on a typewriter. As a child, I remember hearing one of my uncles criticise that fellow Priestley' for using one. It was held against Mr Sam- grass, the oleaginous don in Brideshead Revisited, that 'he had a typewriter some- where concealed in his rooms in All Souls'. My first editor, Alfred Max of the Paris magazine Realiter, would not have deigned to be seen in front of one. My second, Kingsley Martin, had one for emergencies, but never mastered it: he could not even Contrive to keep his left-hand margin straight. The two grandees of the office, Aylmer Valiance and John Freeman, al- Ways dictated their stuff. So, I think, did the literary folk on the floor above: indeed
yividly recall John Raymond writing out his reviews, Greek quotations and all, in his beautiful Westminster hand. Even to- day, I could name famous journalists, some on the right side of 50, who can only Compose in longhand.
All very silly of course. Journalists are foolish if, out of laziness or habit, they don't employ the latest labour-saving de- vices. I discovered 30 years ago I could type at least four times faster than I could write, and with less effort. I don't like the present, let alone the future, any more than anyone else, but a couple of years ago took a resolution that, gritting my teeth, I would take on board any new gadgetry I was convinced was useful. The first thing I did was to transfer from manual to electro- nic typewriter, no easy task. I have always written my books directly onto the typewri- ter, and sufficiently neatly for the copy to. go straight to the printers. But for my last book, Intellectuals, I used two electronic machines in tandem, one for text, the other for footnotes, and found things went much more smoothly. The next step was to acquire a portable mini-computer for journalistic work. I approached this with real anxiety, fearing I would be irrevocably cast by age as a pre-computer type. But the expert at the Daily Mail who instructs me sensibly tells you only what you have to know to operate the machines in the most basic fashion. Thus unblinded by science, I wrote my first piece on it and transmitted it without mishap. 1 am now completely confident about handling it. The keyboard is actually easier than most portable typewriters, and in hundreds of transmissions I have had difficulty on only three occasions (twice through my own fault). It weighs nothing and I can take it anywhere. It eliminates all the time-consuming inconveniences, bad temper and errors of dictating to copy- takers. And of course, in theory at least, it encourages higher quality writing by mak- ing it so easy to erase and insert.
My latest move has been to acquire a fax machine. This too has proved, from the start, an enormous success. I already find it astounding that I failed to get one years ago. It is not as though they are really new. We had one at the New Statesman, to transmit copy to the printer, as long ago as the Fifties, I think. The principle has been around much longer. According to a learned article in the Illustrated London News, the patent of an automatic elec- trochemical recording telegraph was taken out as long ago as 1843, by a Scotsman called Alexander Bain, who made the first fax machine by modifying a system of synchronised electronic clocks. Bain's machine was blind: it ingested the copy by touch. But even the idea of photo-electric scanning, which gives the fax machine sight, goes back to 1902. By the 1930s experiments in the United States were conducted in transmitting newspapers to facsimile receivers attached to radios in the home. All this was killed by the war, and then by television, which held up the fax epoch for a generation.
But it is now upon us. There must be over half a million faxes now in use in Britain and the total is growing fast. As with the onset of the telephone, their usefulness increases pan i passu with the number of firms and people who have them. Their primary function is childishly easy to operate. They are particularly convenient for communicating abroad, thus avoiding the delays not only of our own Post Office but of notoriously bad foreign postal services. This is particularly important to writers like myself who con- duct more and more of their business overseas: if I fax an article to San Francis- co, say, I know it has been received the second I get the report-sheet. I no longer have to worry about motor-cycle messen- gers, postal rates, or, for that matter, censorship. There is a lot of simple plea- sure in a fax too. It is agreeable to come down in the morning to find it has been buzzing away during the night with mes- sages from Australia. America and the like. Some are unusual. The other day I found a request from a Spanish newspaper: 'Require ten-line biographical note on Paul Johnson, giving date and place of birth, marital status and number of sons'.
I rather suspect the fax is more than a trade machine. Unlike the home compu- ter, which turned out to be a non-event, the fax has clear domestic uses. Imagine what Jane Austen would have done with one. The last postal strike, which deton- ated the fax explosion here, must have suggested to many ordinary people, as well as businessmen, that there is now an easy, reliable alternative to sending letters by Her Majesty's mails. Once the cost comes down significantly, we will all be corres- ponding by fax, leaving the Post Office for junk mail. The danger, of course, is junk-fax, a phenomenon already appearing in the United States. But legislation can stop that dead. The truth is, the fax is a marvellous invention, especially for wri- ters; so useful indeed that it is encouraging me to cross that last, dreaded technology frontier and acquire one of those giant computers beloved of American scholars.
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