A Woman Who Built a Chinese Typewriter

With a Chinese typewriter, typing could be fast and accurate. Typists learned to navigate the machine by familiarizing themselves with the general locations of nearly 2,500 Chinese characters.

The Chinese Typewriter offers a lens through which to examine the fraught relationship between language and empire, global modernity and misguided struggle. This is an object history with profound implications for our future.

Lois Lew

Lois Lew had a gift for typing, a talent she honed as a teenager transcribed Chinese newspaper articles while working at a laundry in her hometown of Troy, New York. But it wasn’t until she was in her 40s that she became a star of the IBM Chinese typewriter, the first-of-its-kind machine that rolled out to the world in the 1940’s. It was a remarkably complicated device, as Wikipedia points out: it looks “like a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press” with thousands of little metal characters arranged in a grid system; to operate it one has to learn by heart the location of each character.

The machine was the invention of Kao Chung-chin of New York, who had patented it in the 1940s. He needed skilled Chinese typists to accompany him as he demonstrated the machine from Manhattan to Shanghai, and so he turned to Lois Lew. Lew, then employed at an IBM office in Rochester, New York, had mastered that early, 5,400-character machine. She confidently operated it in presentations to audiences from Manhattan to Shanghai.

When she was asked to join Kao in New York, he told her that she would be the company’s main demonstrator. She was shocked, but she took the job. She devoted herself to practice. She spent every evening commuting to the Bronx from her apartment at the YWCA. She learned the four-digit codes for each of the 5,400 characters. She transcribed passages, translated them into their four-digit code versions, and then inserted those codes into the machine — all with a straight face.

It was a grueling schedule. But it paid off. Lew proved that she could ably operate the Chinese typewriter in front of audiences all over the United States and China, including at the prestigious Park Hotel in Shanghai, where she was flanked by two IBM engineers and Kao himself. She even acted as the interpreter for Kao’s wife, who had tuberculosis and could not travel with him.

After her time at IBM, she and her husband opened Cathay Pagoda, a restaurant in Rochester that went on to become a staple of the city’s dining scene before closing in 2007. And while Lew is no longer an IBM typist, she remains an improbable Chinese typewriter virtuoso.

Chung-Chin Kao

In the early 20th century, typewriters that could print Chinese characters emerged. These machines required more engineering than the typical typewriter because written Chinese is a logographic writing system and involves thousands of different symbols, a far larger number than English’s 26 letters and 14 punctuation marks. To create a character, typists pressed four numeric keys on the keyboard, more or less simultaneously—a process described at the time as “playing a chord on a piano.” To do this, the typist had to quickly select a specific code for the character she wanted from the keyboard’s bank of 36 keys.

To master the IBM Chinese typewriter, a typist would have to memorize a set of four-digit codes and know how to select the appropriate key in a sequence—a process requiring tremendous dexterity and skill. Despite these challenges, the typewriter was a remarkable device that could produce crisp and legible copies of political speeches, study guides, statistics, and other materials. Known as the qi wu jia or ‘writing virtuoso,’ these typists became highly sought after and could generate massive amounts of work in a short amount of time.

When the IBM Chinese typewriter was unveiled in the late 1940s, inventor Chung-Chin Kao needed a few typists to demonstrate it at conventions and universities in the United States and China. He tapped a woman named Lois Lew, who was inexperienced but enthusiastic and a good sport about the public demonstrations.

On stage, Lew sat at the keyboard and pushed the keys with precision and speed. The audience responded with applause. But off the stage, it was a very different story. Kao had partnered with a company called Commercial Press to develop the machine, and he traveled the world to promote it.

To perform at these events, he needed a typist who could not only master the machine but also deliver entertaining and informative speeches about it. He chose Lew, a single mother who had been raised in both the United States and northern China. He soon found that she possessed the unique combination of qualities necessary for a successful public demonstrator: xin and li.

The Chinese Typewriter

In The Chinese Typewriter, Thomas Mullaney traces the invention of the Chinese-language typewriter as a symbol of national identity and technological superiority. He challenges easy narratives about technology and its impacts on history, culture, and the human condition.

The book opens with a parade—not your average street procession, but the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. As athletes from Greece entered the Bird’s Nest stadium, they were trailed by competitors from Afghanistan, Albania, and Guinea-Bissau. The sequence reflected the way that the Chinese alphabetical system honored the founding nation of the Games and ushered in countries according to the number of strokes in the first and second characters of their names.

In the 1910s, a Chinese inventor named Zhou Houkun was inspired by American typewriters to develop a machine that would print characters in Chinese script on paper. He worked with executives at Commercial Press in Shanghai, which devoted significant resources to promoting his MingKwai typewriter. The device was popular in China’s diaspora communities, but it never proved practical or reliable enough to make a lasting impact on the domestic Chinese market.

Despite the failure of the MingKwai, typists continued to experiment with different arrangements for the Chinese language. One of these, designed by Shen Yunfen, a female typist working for the People’s Liberation Army, increased her typing speed from two thousand to three hundred characters per minute by arranging the keys so that a character was displayed as soon as any key was pressed. Her work earned her the distinction of being a ‘first-class hero’ and a ‘second-level model typist’ by the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.

Shen’s efforts, like those of other typists, were driven by the need to be as efficient as possible. But the sheer number of characters in written Chinese—as many as 70,000, with some consisting of 30 strokes—made this progress slow and arduous.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese speakers today use computers and mobile devices to type in their own language. But few of them know that their modern convenience is the result of years of struggle, hard work, and political determination.

The Typewriter in China

Until recently, when a typewriter was used to write in Chinese, the process was a laborious one. Written Chinese is comprised of 70,000 characters and each character typically has multiple strokes. Building a Chinese typewriter was a monumental task—and one that seemed all but impossible.

While the majority of typewriters were designed around alphabets such as English, Russian, and Arabic, early Chinese machines relied on a tray bed containing 2,500 commonly used Chinese characters. Unlike the loose metal slugs of movable type, which could be placed in different locations on the tray, these characters were not arranged by frequency. Instead, a rod divided the characters into three regions: special, common, and less-frequently used, which typists would navigate by reading the general location of each character on the tray bed. Then, a typist would press keys that corresponded to the specific characters in the corresponding region.

Mullaney explains that these devices were ‘essentially an invisible conduit from the typist’s mind to the character she had in mind, and the machine that was most organized, intuitively resembled language itself.’

The resulting devices ranged from the tray-bed models created by Devello Zeletos Sheffield, an American Protestant missionary, to those developed by MIT graduates such as Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan. Both were influenced by the idea that modernising China was of vital importance, and they aimed to build a machine that reflected vernacular speech. They also hoped to make the typing process faster, as well.

In addition to their ability to improve the speed of typing, these new machines also helped create a network of independent typing shops that grew quickly in urban areas. These privately operated shops allowed typists to find work outside their official workplace and even become self-employed, a development that would have far-reaching effects on the modernization of China in later years.

Though the Chinese typewriter may be functionally obsolete, it continues to hold an odd fascination for many in the West, as evidenced by cartoons, MC Hammer videos, and even a reference in The Simpsons. As such, it is a subject that deserves closer scrutiny. The Chinese Typewriter offers an in-depth examination of this strange and fascinating device, and demonstrates how it helped shape the world we live in.