A Woman Who Operated a Chinese Typewriter
Mullaney is a scholar, collector and evangelist of Chinese typewriters. These baroque metal monsters are simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language.
Chinese characters don’t follow the alphabetical order of English words, so typists had to memorize thousands of four-digit codes etched onto a rotating drum.
Lois Lew
A few weeks ago Fast Company published an article by Thomas Mullaney that told the story of Lois Lew, a woman who operated an early Chinese typewriter, and confidently presented the device to audiences from Manhattan to Shanghai in the 1940s. The piece was a fascinating and insightful read (I encourage you to go check it out), but it also gave us a window into a remarkable life.
The Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine. Affixed to the hulking, gunmetal grey chassis was a keyboard with 36 keys that divided into four banks. The machine could produce 5,400 Chinese characters, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.
In order to operate the machine, typists had to memorize a series of codes, or “signals” that represented different combinations of characters. They would then clap their hands and feed paper into the machine, causing the letters to be struck against the paper in a precise pattern. Unlike a standard typewriter, the Chinese machine did not use alphabetical keys; instead it relied on four keys to represent the characters in a specific way.
When the machine was first unveiled, inventor Kao Chung-chin desperately needed typists who spoke Chinese to demonstrate it. He contacted Lois Lew, who worked at an IBM plant in Rochester, New York and was a native speaker of the language. Despite not having a traditional formal education, Kao gave her the job.
She spent a week holed up in a hotel room learning the four-key code system, and then she and Kao went on a worldwide tour, typing for crowds as large as 3,000 people. They were a hit.
But geopolitics ultimately doomed the device, which was never sold in China due to Mao’s rise to power and the resulting civil war. For Lew, however, her time as a typewriting virtuoso was just the beginning.
After retiring from the IBM factory, she and her husband opened a laundromat in downtown Rochester, which became a popular destination for locals and celebrities alike. They then founded Cathay Pagoda, a successful restaurant that became a staple of the city for decades before closing in 2007. Lois Lew died on October 15, 2023, at age 98.
The Chinese Typewriter
In the decades before the Communist era, when a Remington or Underwood would have set Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac typing, Chinese typewriters were rare objects. They were expensive — 20 times more than an average worker could make in a month — and they were often banned from the country, like guns. Only the upper classes could afford them.
The reason is that Chinese writing, unlike the Latin alphabet, is not syllable-based or phonetic, and thus requires a different engineering approach to typing. Thousands of Chinese characters can be fit on a desktop device, but making them available to the masses requires a more complicated system than arranging the Latin alphabet and punctuation marks.
Mullaney describes the experiments, prototypes, failures and successes of the century-long quest to solve this complex design puzzle, which he calls “the great Chinese typewriting miracle.” It’s not only the story of how Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard, but also a fascinating lens through which to look at broader histories of Chinese mass mobilisation, science and technology, literacy, women, industry and cultural work.
Early systems for Chinese typing began with etchings on a rotating drum that featured 4,662 commonly used characters, arranged in 30 concentric rings, each with four character positions. As the drum spun, the operator could activate a lever and press a key, which would then punch a corresponding letter into place on a tray bed of letters below.
Typists learned to navigate this cluttered landscape of symbols by memorizing, if not the exact x-y coordinates of each character, then at least the general location of each. They practiced repetitive drills that involved two-character words, such as the simple phrase
Later, a more sophisticated system was devised by the well-known scholar and author Lin Yutang. His model allowed for an even more flexible system of locating characters, by requiring the user to draw what she wanted in a menu with her finger; then a machine would select the character that most closely resembled it.
Thomas Mullaney
Unlike the alphabetic keyboards of Remingtons and Underwoods, Chinese typewriters feature a matrix of thousands of characters that don’t fit into any obvious alphabetical order. For decades, they’ve been objects of curiosity, confusion and ridicule. The Simpsons featured a fictional machine that was “like a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press,” and a hip-hop dance routine by MC Hammer imitated the flailing motions of a Chinese typist hopping about on a mammoth keyboard.
Stanford University associate professor Thomas Mullaney wants to give these esoteric contraptions their due, arguing that the various solutions that tinkerers came up with in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter pioneered familiar smartphone-era technologies like predictive text and autocomplete. Three of the machines he’s assembled are on display in his East Asia Library until Sept. 10, and he’s hoping to raise money on Kickstarter to take the collection on a tour around the world.
The first experimental Chinese typewriter was devised by Devello Zeletos Sheffield, an American Protestant missionary in China who started work on the apparatus in the 1880s. It sported an array of 4,662 commonly used Chinese characters arranged on 30 concentric rings around the machine’s frame. The characters could be sorted into regions of special, very common and more-common usage, allowing typists to prioritize which characters they’d hit on the tray-bed first.
Other inventors repackaged Japanese machines in their quest to create a Chinese typing machine, but the man who was perhaps the most tireless in his pursuit of a workable model was Tsinghua- and Harvard-educated Lin Yutang. He worked on a number of different prototypes, but the one that finally went commercially was his MingKwa, which debuted in 1949.
Mullaney writes that the MingKwa was “the most formidable, imposing, and intimidating of all the Chinese typewriters,” as it boasted 36 keys divided into four banks. It was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters, wielding a language infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.
The MingKwa was a heavy, cumbersome machine, and only the most experienced typists could use it quickly and accurately. It was also very expensive: a single machine would cost 20 times what the average worker in Communist-era China made in a month. That meant that the state controlled typeswriters the way it controlled guns, and only a handful of companies were allowed to produce them.
Fast Company
With her brash style and quick wit, Babitz captures the spirit of 60s/70s Los Angeles, writing about the city’s privileged class of celebrities, socialites and wannabes. The book reads like a gossip session with Babitz’s friends and draws you into her world of palm trees, cocktails, parties and relaxation.
During China’s Republican period (1911-1949), two Chinese inventors produced the first mass-manufactured machines to mechanize written Chinese. Building on systems pioneered by Chinese typists and American academics, these inventors devised methods to order tens of thousands of characters so they could be tapped out quickly and easily using keyboards.
They were cumbersome and slow to use, but they got the job done. They helped revolutionize the production of political speeches, study guides, statistics and more. Typists, mostly women, poured themselves into preparing these documents in sizable numbers, working from typing institutes and often establishing their own.
The hulking machines looked like a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press. The keys were covered with countless buttons filled with complicated-looking symbols. Typed by an experienced typist, they could produce as much as 2,500 characters in one go. They were also incredibly heavy—roughly 30 to 40 pounds.
Although Kao’s invention didn’t reach the market, he was the named inventor on several patents related to Chinese typewriters. He was also a prominent figure in the world of Chinese literature, writing extensively and founding a literary journal. He became a symbol of the new era of modern China when he was pictured in a 1920s magazine alongside Sun Yat-sen and other Reform Era politicians.
Today, millions of Chinese speakers still type, though they do so on desktop computers, laptops and smartphones. Most type using a system that relies on spelling to select characters. For example, to type ni hao (hello), you would enter n-i-h-a-o on the Qwerty keypad and then scroll through menus of characters until you find the one that matches your pronunciation. Alternatively, some devices allow users to draw the character they want by hand on a touchscreen and then tap it into place. While these systems have a long way to go to match the speed and accuracy of the ancient Chinese typewriter, they’re a big step in the right direction.
