The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter
When the IBM Chinese typewriter was introduced in the 1940s, inventor Kao Chung-chin needed typists to demonstrate it nationally and internationally. His first choice, Grace Tong, fell ill and was never replaced.
The device required memorizing four-digit codes for the 5,400 characters of a language far more difficult to mechanize than the alphabet-based English.
Lois Lew
When the first IBM Chinese typewriter debuted in the 1940’s, it was a formidable machine. It required the user to memorize thousands of four-digit codes that corresponded with characters etched on a revolving drum. This drum measured 7 inches in diameter and 11 inches in length. It was capable of typing 5,400 Chinese characters, punctuation marks, and numerals. Mastering the machine was not for the faint of heart, but it was manageable if you could learn the code system and practice. That’s exactly what improbable Lois Lew did.
In 1949, when Mao Zedong took power in China, the world was stunned by the brutality of the new regime’s anti-reform policies. The regime was concerned with control over information, including the dissemination of information through typewriters. The government controlled typewriters like guns, requiring that every letter be approved by a censor before it was sent out. This policy resulted in many people, including authors, unable to use their typewriters. One such author was C.S. Lewis, who had written The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of fantasy novels that have sold millions of copies worldwide.
Although Lewis’s writing was banned in the People’s Republic of China, he continued to communicate through the medium of the written word. He sent letters to friends, family members, and other literary figures. Some of these were censored, but others made it through. He also used a typewriter to write and edit his books. The letters he received helped him keep in touch with his fans.
In his later years, Lewis lived at The Kilns in Oxford, a house that was home to a number of notable writers and thinkers. His writings continue to be popular, especially his philosophical works, which have been translated into 30 languages and adapted for stage, TV, and film. He also wrote a number of plays, including the popular The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In 1966, Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, which is widely considered one of the most important works in Christian literature. He was also an influential intellectual, publishing essays on philosophy and theology. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages and are used in schools around the world.
Kao
Kao is a typewriter that can handle thousands of Chinese characters. It is an incredibly personal machine that can transform the user’s life through its ability to express language and emotion. As a form of communication, it is a tool that can be used to connect and inspire people from different backgrounds. It is also a source of creativity and freedom. For these reasons, it is a powerful tool for shaping the world around us.
The story begins in the 1940s when IBM attempted to market a typewriter capable of handling all 5,400 Chinese characters. However, the machine proved difficult to use and had a number of flaws. This was largely due to the fact that users had to memorize 4-digit codes for each character. A woman named Lois Lew stepped up to challenge the problem, and her efforts led to a breakthrough that revolutionized writing.
In order to create the typewriter, Lew used her background in science and engineering. She spent months working with Chinese-speaking engineers and writers to develop the machine’s complex algorithms. She even travelled to China to show it off to potential customers. Eventually, her invention was adopted by the United States government and sold across the country.
Lew was named a national hero in 1952, and her work has earned her numerous patents. She has also received many awards and accolades for her contributions to the development of the typing machine. Her invention has helped many people improve their lives through their work.
Kao has built a reputation as an innovative company by creating products that are based on Yoki-Monozukuri, the traditional Japanese value of making things that are simple and beautiful. The company’s research and development centers are located in various parts of the globe, bringing together diverse strengths and expertise to deliver quality products for every person.
Kao has an interesting theory about why the passenger recognized them. They think that the other timeline is somehow connected to Ellin Forest, which makes it impossible for them to exist at the same time. This is how they explain why the passenger recognizes them despite being hundreds of years in the past.
Shu-style typewriters
While Qwerty may have captivated the world, the Chinese language was not so easily mechanized. Its myriad ideograms required thousands of metal blocks, one for each character, and the arrangement of these blocks was a complicated task. Despite these difficulties, Chinese scholars and engineers were not daunted by the challenge and began to experiment with ways of resolving the underlying linguistic problems. The Chinese typewriter was a nascent industry in the early 20th century. Many of its pioneers came from overseas, as China subsidized its youth with scholarships to study abroad, a policy imposed in part by the Boxer Rebellion. This influx of foreign influences influenced how the machine was designed and ultimately shaped its final form.
Thomas Mullaney, a Stanford University historian, has written a fascinating book about the development of Chinese mechanical typewriters. He calls them “a historical lens of remarkable clarity.” The Chinese typewriter is a crucible that illuminates the fraught relationship between translation and empire, writing and modernity. It also reveals a story of resourceful workers and blundering inventors.
The earliest models of the Chinese typewriter were based on Western designs. They included a flat zinc-coated steel panel with characters facing downward, with a little “caves(Xue)” on the upper side to catch the pointing finger and help line up the character underneath. These features made the machine more compact and light. In addition, they could reduce the number of keys needed to create a given character.
Another key innovation was the detachable keyboard, which allowed typists to remove the cylinder character roll and replace it with a new one without disrupting the text. This made the typewriter more efficient and reduced costs. The first model that used this design was a typewriter produced by Commercial Press in Shanghai.
It was an extremely successful machine and was sold to many Chinese offices and businesses. Among its customers were the Chinese consulates in Canada and the Chinese post office in Shanghai. In its heyday, the Commercial Press produced 100 machines a year of this kind for use at home and abroad.
Typing in Chinese
For more than a century, the Chinese typewriter has been a source of fascination and confusion — and even a bit of ridicule. On “The Simpsons,” smarty-pants Lisa was confounded by an imaginary machine with countless buttons covered in complicated-looking characters, while a hip-hop dance routine performed by MC Hammer featured frantic movements that supposedly replicated the laborious flailing of a Chinese typist trying to quickly hop around a room-sized keyboard.
Despite the absurd representations of typing in China, the reality was quite different. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the only way to put Chinese onto paper was by abandoning the notion of a standard keyboard and instead using a rectangular tray that carried tiny metal characters, each engraved with one character. Typists would move the tray around until they found the right character, then press a lever to force the mechanism to pick up the characters and bang them against the paper.
The first working Chinese typewriters had only a few thousand of the most common characters. In 1947, Lin Yutang devised a system of partial characters that enabled the machine to print over 8,000 more. But even that system was still far slower than the speed with which Western typists could crank out words on a Remington typewriter or a modern smartphone keypad.
Thomas Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford University and a fellow at the university’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), uses the development of the Chinese typewriter to show how the rise of alphabetic languages like English led to the subjugation of character-based scripts. He recently discussed his new book on the subject, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, at a CCSRE research event.
For more than a decade, Mullaney has been researching and collecting Chinese typewriters. His collection now contains 12 machines, which may not sound like a lot, but is four times as many as the world’s only Chinese typewriter museum in Shanghai. The machines are used in his research, but he also occasionally takes them to school and speaks about their history to students.
