The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

For decades, typists like Lois Lew honed their skills on esoteric machines that looked like a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press. The devices, dubbed Chinese typewriters, had trays with thousands of metal slugs arranged in a grid; typists had to memorize where the characters were.

Lois Lew

When the Chinese typewriter was unveiled in 1947, its inventor Chung-Chin Kao needed typists to demonstrate it across the United States and in China. The hulking, gunmetal gray machine was a formidable beast. It had 36 keys divided into four banks, each mapped to a single character in the 5,400-character Chinese script. But even more daunting than the machinery was the task of learning to wield it. To do so, typists had to memorize a set of four-digit codes and then transcribe passages from English into Chinese and back again, all without referring to any sort of code book along the way.

Kao enlisted a young woman named Lois Lew, who was a resident of Rochester, New York at the time. He didn’t have high hopes for her; he told her to spell “encyclopedia” and she couldn’t. But he needed her more than she knew. He’d envisioned a college-educated woman who could speak both Chinese and English to function as the machine’s human translator, but that candidate had dropped out for reasons unknown. And he didn’t think Lew had any traditional formal education.

As it turned out, her abysmal spelling was no deterrent to her abilities with the Chinese typewriter. Once she had learned the codes and their corresponding characters, she traveled around the United States and then to China to demonstrate the device.

These presentations were not unlike a live version of the video game Simon, in which typists are expected to play blindly and perfectly. The only difference is that the typists were operating a machine that was actually capable of producing actual ink characters, rather than a video monitor that simply displayed a picture of them. And, of course, there was no feedback loop – no way to correct a mistake before it was committed to paper and inked onto the screen.

It’s been more than 70 years since the improbable story of Lois Lew unfolded, and she has continued to live her remarkable life. She swims at the YMCA three hours a week, still recalls many of those four-digit codes, and regrets that she never bought IBM stock.

Thomas Mullaney

In the early 20th century, inventors vied to solve the information technology and engineering puzzle of creating a Chinese typewriter. Two inventors made significant headway: Zhou Houkun of MIT devised an apparatus based on “common usage Chinese,” selecting the 3,000 most commonly used characters; Qi Xuan of NYU broke the Chinese script into modular pieces, enabling typists to spell characters by touching keys in alphabetical order. Zhou’s better-performing machine ultimately became the country’s first mass-manufactured Chinese typewriter, known as the Shuzhendong.

Throughout the decades, Chinese typewriters were used across China, from the urban centers of Shanghai and Beijing to remote regions in western China. Typewritten documents were used by government agencies, universities, and businesses. Even after 1949, the Communist revolution, typewriters were still used to produce a wide range of documents, from local investigations of Catholic communities to provincial-level Party secretaries’ reports on food products.

The Chinese ideographs were cumbersome for typewriters, as the machines’ keys had to be moved from position to position in order to form the desired characters. However, a number of Chinese inventors worked to develop more user-friendly technology. In the 1960s, Kao was the named inventor on several patent applications, including a meteorological recording machine USPN 2,408780A (1944), a copy holder for stenography USPN 2617386A (1949), and a Chinese language telegraph printer USPN 2,728,816A (1953).

Mullaney explores a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, and failures in the century-long quest to create a workable Chinese typewriter. He also shows how the development of these machines influenced modern word processing technology through predictive typing technologies that rely on the most frequently used characters.

As Mullaney demonstrates, the history of the Chinese typewriter is a story of resistance against presumed alphabetic universalism. The book’s careful documentation of these efforts, and its grappling with larger issues of technological change and global communication, make it more than just an object history. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and its interaction with the rest of the world.

The Chinese Typewriter

When most people think of Chinese typewriters, they imagine massive machines resembling baroque metal monsters that resemble the sort of thing you’d see in an 18th-century cartoon mocked by Mark Twain or MC Hammer. But they are more than just writing machines; they’re incarnations of philosophies about how to order a language with thousands of characters that don’t share an inherent alphabetic ordering like A-B-C-D-E-F-G. They’re the tools that enabled people to churn out the literary and business documents that drove China into modernity, and they are the subject of Thomas Mullaney’s new book.

Mullaney, who is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, has made it his mission to document and explain these machines in all their inscrutable glory. His book is encyclopedic, engaging and erudite, and it has already drawn rave reviews in publications such as The London Review of Books, The Spectator and The Wall Street Journal.

A sort of accidental expert on the Chinese typewriter (he picked up his first machine from a man selling an old church), Mullaney has become something of an evangelist for the machines. He collects them and has lectured on them at Google and around Silicon Valley. He even tries to get them into use again. But he also explores their history, which includes the repression that made them a symbol of the old China that was no longer allowed to exist.

Designed to be a workhorse for literary and business writers, the Chinese typewriter was built on a system of three regions on its tray bed for frequently and less frequently used characters and a rod connecting those characters to a cylinder that imprinted them onto paper. But these were cumbersome devices, and the typist had to carefully place each slug of type using tweezers or a piece of cloth. As such, they were not as fast as their Western counterparts.

Despite the slowness and inconvenience, the Chinese typewriter became an important tool for the elites who had access to one. It was not, as some feared at the time, a step toward samurai-like feudalism, but a way to spread information rapidly and widely.

Chinese Typewriters

When most people think of Chinese typewriters, they probably imagine a massive machine that has thousands of keys and looks uncannily like a regular typewriter. This image has persisted in popular culture, from turn-of-the-century cartoons ridiculing the Chinese language to MC Hammer’s frenetic dance routine (nicknamed the “Chinese typewriter”), which was meant to mock the supposedly slow and confusing typing of Chinese characters. But real Chinese typewriters looked nothing like this.

The machines, like the one in Mullaney’s collection, were baroque metal monsters that were simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize the language. Because Chinese characters don’t have an inherent order, typists had to develop a system of arrangement that relied on a set of rules and symbols.

A typist moved the gridded bed with their left hand, and then used their right to move a mechanical arm over top of the Chinese character they wanted to be printed. When the arm pressed down, it picked up a loose metal “slug” and lifted it into a type chamber, where it swung up quickly to strike the paper. The slug was then returned to its original position as the typist moved on to another character.

These typesetters were usually women from the lower or middle classes, who were trained at local typing institutes and then worked in government offices, universities, banks and other private institutions. They were responsible for reproducing waves after waves of speeches, pamphlets and other political materials that accompanied the massive communist efforts to reshape China. When a typist like Zhang Jiying managed to set more than 50 Chinese characters per minute, her accomplishment made headlines in the Party newspaper and brought her fame, prestige and even a spot on a Maoist propaganda poster.

Although the era of these giant typewriters has come to an end, the technology that enabled them—and the complex philosophies behind them—still shape how we communicate. We may soon see the era of the keyboard come to an end, with voice recognition and stylus-equipped tablets potentially allowing us to sidestep it altogether, but the legacy of these strange, baroque machines is a crucial part of the history of communication.