The Chinese Typewriter

The Chinese typewriter is no longer a common sight, but its story remains fascinating. Two recent books, Thomas Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter and Jing Tsu’s more accessible Kingdom of Characters, reveal a century of experiments, failures, and successes in the quest for a machine that would let people type their native language.

What Is a Chinese Typewriter?

When people hear the term “chinese typewriter,” they may think of turn-of-the-century cartoons mocking its use or MC Hammer dancing with one or a massive machine. In reality, the Chinese typewriter was a remarkable engineering feat and a complex tool that enabled typists to prepare crisp and legible documents for political speeches, study guides, statistics, and other information.

Unlike the keyboards of standard Remington models that feature the alphabet, which could hold only one character at a time, a Chinese typewriter was designed to accommodate thousands of characters in a single document. To accomplish this, the machine employed a system of character-selection levers over a tray bed that held loose, metal slugs that represented each Chinese character (see the picture above). When the typist moved the character-selection lever over the trays, the machine lifted the slug to an inking mechanism and then struck it onto paper with great force. It then returned the slug to its original position, leaving behind the impression that had been printed.

Typists needed to familiarize themselves with the general locations of nearly 2,500 Chinese characters in order to navigate this system. They learned to do so through repetitive drills that began with common, two-character phrases like xue xue and sheng sheng or yin yin and wei wei. Over time, typists memorized the relative locations of these slugs on the tray bed and developed an intuition for predicting where a specific character might appear in a phrase.

The result was an extraordinarily complicated machine that required an equally extraordinary amount of training to operate. It’s no wonder, then, that most people never saw one in action – not even during the height of Maoist communism when newspapers were filled with absurd depictions of typists arduously operating room-sized keyboards to produce simple words or sentences.

Stanford history associate professor Thomas Mullaney has spent his life tracking down and preserving Chinese typewriters, which he views as “a fascinating technolinguistic artifact.” While the machines are functionally obsolete, he says they deserve to be preserved and studied. Mullaney believes that understanding how the machine was constructed can reveal how it was used in the past and provide clues about the future of communication devices.

The History of the Chinese Typewriter

Unlike the standard alphabetic typewriters with their keys that correspond to letters, Chinese-language machines required that typists memorize the location of each character on a tray bed of loose metal “slugs.” Each slug held one character and the machine was designed to allow for substitutions and variations in pronunciation.

Despite their obscurity and utterly antiquated appearance, these esoteric contraptions were actually quite useful. According to associate professor of history at Stanford University Thomas Mullaney, they “pioneered predictive text and autocomplete features that are now ubiquitous on smartphone apps.” In his new book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press), he describes the century-long quest to solve the problem of fitting thousands of characters onto a desktop device—a journey that resulted in an amazing array of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes.

For example, the first experimental Chinese typewriter was designed by Lin Yutang, a writer and early advocate for Chinese unification. His machine featured 4,662 common characters arranged on a wheel in 30 concentric rings. The typist moved the ring to locate the desired character, and then pushed a lever to cause it to be picked up by a mechanical arm that banged it against paper.

This device proved to be unwieldy and impractical, but it laid the foundation for future inventions. In fact, the era of the Chinese typewriter saw its “golden age” during the Maoist period, when the famous pale green ‘Double Pigeon’ brand machine was in widespread use.

Eventually, the technology improved to the point where it could print more than 2,000 characters in one pass. However, it was still far too difficult to produce any sort of meaningful document, especially in the limited time available at work or school. This, combined with the ascendancy of Western alphabetic languages in telecommunications and the subjugation of character-based scripts, contributed to the decline of the Chinese typewriter. Today, few Chinese speakers ever touch one. Instead, millions of people type—or attempt to—Chinese on desktop computers and mobile devices. The development of a qwerty-style keyboard for the language has helped usher in a new era, argues Mullaney, that he calls “the kanjisphere.” For more on this fascinating story, see his recent article on Chinese computing and the radical Alphabet.

The Chinese Typewriter in the Movies

When most people hear the words “Chinese typewriter,” they probably picture a massive machine with thousands of keys. And indeed, some Chinese typewriters were enormous, but that’s not what the word really means.

A closer look reveals that Chinese typewriters were actually technologically remarkable devices that operated according to a number of different principles. These baroque metal monsters were simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. Because Chinese characters don’t have an alphabetic order like the letters of a Qwerty keyboard, they were organized using a series of patterns that could be recognized and remembered.

The first of these systems was created by the brothers Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan in 1922. They called it the “Comfortable Zhendong Chinese Typewriter.” It was not an easy machine to use: you had to remember a vast array of codes, including the names of thousands of characters. It was the job of typists to learn these codes, and a good typist could type out hundreds of characters per minute.

Another key technology was created by Lin Yutang, the inventor of MingKwai, which is perhaps the most famous — and misunderstood — Chinese typewriter in history. MingKwai looked a lot like a Western typewriter, and in fact was only slightly larger. It was the first Chinese typewriter to include a keyboard, and it became a symbol of Maoist propaganda in the 1950s.

Today, no one uses a Chinese typewriter in real life, but they’re still in the movies. From a turn-of-the-century cartoon mocking the machine to MC Hammer’s dance with a Chinese typewriter to the NSFW typist in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, they’re a fixture of pop culture.

Mullaney is a typewriter evangelist, having started collecting them in 2008 and now owning 12 machines, which might not sound impressive until you realize that’s four times as many as China’s only typewriter museum. He’s also given lectures on Chinese typewriters at Google and around Silicon Valley. He believes the machines deserve a place in history and may even hold some seeds of inspiration for communication technologies of the future.

The Chinese Typewriter in Real Life

Despite being dismissed as an archaic relic in the West, the Chinese typewriter has an intriguing story to tell. Stanford history associate professor Thomas Mullaney, who is almost the only expert on these esoteric contraptions, says they were actually quite sophisticated and pioneered familiar smartphone-era technologies like predictive text. He explains the complex history of these misunderstood machines in his new book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History.

In the early 20th century, engineers and linguists from China and beyond wrestled with the question of how to type Chinese characters on a machine that only used alphabet keys. One of the first Chinese inventors to produce a commercially viable machine was Zhou Houkun, who had studied in the United States before developing his design. In the 1920s, he was working for the Commercial Press in Shanghai when executives heard of his invention. They promptly offered him a job and financial backing for his project.

Zhou’s machine had a tray bed with thousands of metal character slugs, which he arranged in a grid system that resembled the alphabet letters on a traditional keyboard. Typists moved a character-selection lever over the tray, which picked up and inked each slug as it passed by. Once the typist had finished typing a word or phrase, she returned the lever to its original position to advance to the next row of slugs. The machine also had an automatic correction feature that made adjustments when it encountered misspellings or other mistakes.

After Zhou’s successful prototype, a number of other engineers developed further improvements. Toward the end of the 1950s, for example, a Presbyterian missionary named Devello Sheffield received a patent for a Chinese typewriter with an arrangement that was more natural and allowed typists to locate words more quickly.

The Communist government celebrated these advancements, publishing stories about typists who had been able to increase their typing speeds by hundreds of characters per hour. In fact, by the end of the decade, typists could produce nearly five thousand characters per hour, which was far faster than the two-thousand-character average of the previous generation.