The Chinese Typewriter: A History

A fascinating book that looks at the history of typing Chinese characters. In the modern computer era, we are all used to seeing a standard computer keyboard that is able to produce various characters, from the Latin alphabet to Chinese/Japanese/Korean or other languages. But before computers, there was an era where mechanical typewriters would need to produce characters in non-Latin languages, and this book covers that in great detail.

The first chapter looks at how the 'myth' of a huge, Chinese typewriter with thousands of keys (that never existed) came to be. To tell that tale, the author steps back a pace and starts with looking at how the current form of the mechanical typewriter (with a fixed number of keys and a shift mechanism) came to be and why alternative types of typewriters fell out of contention. He then shows how various non-English scripts (like Thai, Arabic and various European languages) were modified and mangled to fit the typewriter (for typewriters were mass-manufactured to a single, fixed set of keys). The only mechanical changes allowed were to cater for right-to-left scripts (like Arabic and Hebrew) and to accommodate no-space and variable spacing between characters. With no leeway to increase the number of keys, it would be obvious that Chinese (with its thousands of characters) would never be accommodated, leading to the rise of the mythical Chinese typewriter with thousands of keys. It was also a way to imply that Chinese characters were more 'primitive' and could not be used in a 'modern' and 'progressive' society, as embodied by the technology of a typewriter.

The second chapter looks at the puzzle that the Chinese characters present to printing (with a printing press) and the telegraph. Three approaches were tried. The first is to create a collection of the most commonly used Chinese characters, enough to print out the majority of books in Chinese. The second approach is to 'break up' as many Chinese characters as possible into 'submodules' of characters that can be recombined to produce any Chinese character. The third is to bypass the problem of reproducing Chinese characters at all; instead, each (or most) characters are represented as a number that is transmitted, and it is up to the sender and receiver to agree on a common number to represent each character. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages and serves as an introduction into the next chapter, the creation of an actual Chinese typewriter.

The third chapter looks at early attempts to create a real Chinese typewriter, both by Chinese who went to the West looking for opportunities to introduce technology to a modernizing China and settled on the creation of a typewriter. The first one was an attempt to use only the most common Chinese characters and aimed at the masses. The second one was also a creation that used the most common Chinese characters but included options to combine radicals to create other characters. While prototypes of both (and a few other machines briefly mentioned here) existed at one point, they were ultimately never mass-produced.

Chapter four finally looks at a mass-produced Chinese typewriter. This was a flatbed type design with several thousand characters and a separate tray holding additional characters that can be added to empty spaces. Besides the design, the author also looks at the culture that developed around it, including the culture of promoting 'typing girls' in promotional and news material around the typewriter, despite men forming a significant minority of typist for the Chinese typewriter. There are some notes that this may be influenced by western depictions of typist, which do consist of mainly women. The art of learning to use the typewriter, developing the muscle memory needed to quickly select character after character, is discussed in this chapter. An abortive attempt to release a Chinese typewriter without Chinese characters (it was an attempt by Chinese educationalist to simplify the system by promoting simple individual characters) is also covered here.

Chapter five switches to the development of Japanese typewriters. Two types were in use: one that handles Japanese kana characters (and relatively easy to develop as there were a limited number of characters) and one for kanji, similar to Chinese characters. The similarity of Kanji to Chinese would enable the Japanese manufacturers to enter the Chinese market and begin to dominate it. Chinese typewriter makers attempted to compete with either local designs or ones (quietly) copied from the Japanese. But World War II would change matters, causing Japanese typewriters to dominate the Chinese marketplace.

Chapter six starts with a diversion into the present, showing how the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) input system works on current computers: it requires the user to enter two or more key presses to generate a Chinese character. Once this is understood by the reader, the author then quickly goes through the history of attempts to categorize Chinese characters for quicker searching and indexing. He then introduces a mechanical marvel: a Chinese typewriter that implements a mechanical version of the modern-day CJK system to produce Chinese characters. But for political turmoil in China (the takeover by the Communists), this might have become a widely manufactured typewriter system.

Chapter seven shows the growth of Chinese typewriters. But with that growth comes pressure to increase the typing speed. This, the author says, would lead to an early form of predictive input. Users would discard the approach of arranging the characters on the typewriter by a 'logical' pattern (the type of strokes, for example) but instead would group characters by usage, keeping often used characters close to each other. Using such methods, typists would boost the amount of characters they can produce to keep up with the needs of the state for typed documents.

It is here that the book ends. The next book, the author promises, would cover the advancement of typing Chinese into the computer era.

The history of the Chinese Typewriter is ultimately, the history of China and the information technology of the rest of the world. Reading this book myself being a Chinese, it provides a unique and fascinating perspective to see how China is playing catching ups in the entirety of the twentieth century. While exploring the incarnations and evolutions of Chinese typewriters (though you'll soon learn that they're exactly not for typing), Mullaney also delves into the politics, wars, intellectuals, zealots, patriots, industries along with the machine.

Most people like me who were born in the digital age are surely oblivious to the extreme difficulties of putting Chinese characters onto a piece of paper. The computers gave us much liberation from the toil. “Typing” on a QWERTY seems second nature to me. However, as Mullaney will point out very soon into the book, it hasn't always been like this. It took generations of experiments, failures, and ingenuity to solve a problem westerners can't even begin to fathom. We'd even think that it was the creation of computers that freed the Chinese from the seemingly impossible feat, it actually began decades prior, with tragedies and setbacks. The unfolding of that piece of story was brilliantly written.

A most interesting chapter 7 described what we call “共产中文”, or Communism Chinese. I find that so relevant even to this very day. Like all histories, one must learn to be cautious of the now with lessons of the then.

Overall I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who is Chinese or is interested in China/Chinese.