Did Messi really send his Barcelona transfer request by fax?

Imagine writing an email by hand, then scanning it and feeding the sheet of paper into a kind of hybrid between a phone and a printer, for the recipient to print out before writing their reply. That's basically fax. If it sounds very old-fashioned, that's because it is. The idea was first patented by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain in 1843 - long before the telephone was invented. He would swing a pendulum over a line drawing made of copper. Each time it hit a bit of copper, the pendulum would send an electrical signal to another pendulum, which would copy out the same image. The copy was an exact replica of the original - a "facsimile", or fax for short. This was...