The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

For a century, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity, confusion and even ridicule. They appeared in Mao-era propaganda posters and on The Simpsons.

Despite their strange appearance, the typists who used them were solving a fascinating engineering puzzle. Their solutions may still hold some lessons for today’s designers of smart phones and other new technologies.

Lois Lew

In the days before predictive technology made typing on cell phone virtual keyboards nearly a snap, typists had to memorize entire charts of four-digit codes to create characters that would appear on a physical keyboard. That was true for typists working in telegraph offices, emergency responders, court stenographers, trained musicians, and even police officers. But few people were able to pull off such a remarkable feat of memory as the young woman seen in the film. Her name was Lois Lew, and she was the master of the IBM Chinese typewriter.

The hulking, gunmetal gray machine looked something like a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press, and its keys were arranged in four banks, each of which had six keystrokes. Each of these keystrokes corresponded to one of five letters, punctuation marks, numerals, and other symbols etched on the revolving drum inside the machine.

When the device was first unveiled, inventor Chung-Chin Kao needed a Chinese-speaking typist to help him demonstrate it in the United States and China. He turned to Lew, a typist at an IBM plant in Rochester, New York. But she didn’t have traditional formal education, which made her a less-than-desirable candidate. Kao quickly discovered, though, that she was a fast learner who could quickly pick up the Chinese language and operate his machine.

A few weeks later, she and Kao were launching a world tour, typing in front of crowds that numbered in the thousands. But as the tour progressed, it became clear that Kao’s machine wouldn’t be a hit in China, where he had hoped to sell the most units. The reason was simple: Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution had already swept through the country, and the nation was now closed off to Western technology.

Kao eventually stopped promoting the machine, and he redirected Lew’s attention to her own family and business. She and her husband opened a laundromat, and then later launched Cathay Pagoda, a Chinese restaurant in Rochester that was a popular destination for students and other locals—and occasionally celebrities such as Katherine Hepburn. The restaurant lasted until 2007, and in her later years, Lew still swam three hours a week at the local YMCA and said her only regret was not buying IBM stock when it went public.

The Chinese Typewriter

The scuffed, weathered surface of MOCA’s Chinese typewriter tells a fascinating story. It’s a testament to the ingenuity of Chinese designers as they worked out how to fit tens of thousands of characters on an easy-to-use tabletop device. And it’s a lens through which we can examine broader histories of mass mobilization, science and technology, literacy, women, and industry.

Unlike English or Russian, where keystrokes produce a letter or a word, the Chinese alphabet consists of characters that represent entire words and concepts. Historically, the Chinese language has been one of the most difficult to mechanically typecast. During the heyday of mechanical Chinese typing, typists maxed out at just a few dozen characters per minute.

That all changed with the Maoist revolution of 1949. At that point, a new generation of typists began experimenting with character arrangements that would allow them to increase their output significantly. By 1953, Shen Yunfen could type more than two thousand characters in an hour. This feat earned her a place in the People’s Daily as a ‘first-class model typist’.

As these changes took hold, a ‘golden age’ of mechanical Chinese writing emerged during the post-Mao era. Typewritten documents and pamphlets became commonplace, even in rural and remote areas. Typewritten reports from local government offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Harbin and elsewhere appear by 1957 in survey studies of Catholic communities in these locations.

But the real-life Chinese typewriters of this era looked nothing like the fantasy devices that we imagine when we think about them. For one thing, they were much smaller than is often assumed. They also lacked a keyboard and instead used a tray bed of loose metal slugs that resembled those of movable type.

Tom Mullaney is a professor of East Asian languages and cultures at Stanford who is an expert on the history of the Chinese typewriter. He has collected 12 machines and lectures about them to audiences around the world. A few years ago, he wrote The Chinese Typewriter, which recounts this fascinating story. Mullaney’s book explores the ways in which the Chinese typewriter evolved to solve the ‘impossible-seeming’ problem of fitting tens of thousands of characters on an efficient desktop machine, and connects this story to wider histories of orthography, language, and technology.

Memorization

For many people, the idiom “memorize” refers to committing to memory a string of words or numbers. But in writing, it can also mean to commit to memory a series of characters that can later be reproduced in a more or less fluid fashion. For the millions of Chinese who worked to produce government and business documents during China’s Republican era, this latter form of memorization was essential.

That’s because, unlike a language like English or Spanish that relies on an alphabet, written Chinese is a logographic language, meaning that each character represents a different image or sound, each of which can be represented by an individual symbol or glyph. As such, developing a typewriter that could support Chinese required far more engineering complexity than one that could only handle the digits and letters of Latin-based languages, which generally require only a few thousand symbols each.

Engineers and linguists from within China and beyond grappled with this challenge for 150 years, leading to a variety of designs, prototypes and failures. But one Chinese inventor, Zhou Houkun, succeeded in building a machine that allowed for a significant leap in efficiency: He designed the first Chinese typewriter to use trays filled with movable metal casts of the most common characters arranged in a grid; typists would move a selector lever over the tray to hunt for a character, then press a bar to activate a mechanism that picked up the symbol, printed it and returned the tray to its original position.

The result was a machine that looked uncannily like a conventional typewriter and behaved in a way that would confuse any typist who sat down at it, despite the fact that each symbol produced on paper bore no one-to-one relationship to any keystrokes that might have been pressed on the machine’s keys. It may be a lost technology, but for Mullaney and others who have studied the story of the Chinese typewriter, it offers a rare window into the tinkerers’ century-long struggle to solve an engineering puzzle—and provides a unique lens through which to examine broader histories of science and technology, literacy, and the intersections between work and cultural production.

Technology

Chinese writing is the only major world script that isn’t alphabetic, and for decades, engineers struggled to make typewriters work with it. In his new book, Stanford University professor Thomas Mullaney lays out the tinkerers and inventors, and their failures and successes, in a century-long quest to get a Chinese typewriter to work.

Unlike English, which can be printed quickly on keyboard-controlled machines that inject liquid metal into type molds, Chinese texts require thousands of individual characters to be assembled by hand on wooden boards, or ideographs, as they are called in China. The characters aren’t grouped together in logical ways, but randomly, and the order in which they’re placed affects meaning. This asymmetry has made Chinese typewriters a challenge to use even in modern times.

As a result, most people who knew how to use one were typists or teachers at schools. These workers were typically lower- or middle-school-educated women, and many found employment in banks, offices, government and universities. They learned to use a Chinese typewriter through years of study at typing institutes, and they could then prepare crisp and legible copies of political speeches, study guides, and statistical data.

The inventors of the first commercially-manufactured Chinese typewriters built on the basic method that Lew and other typists had learned, but they also innovated to make the machine easier to operate. One of the most important innovations was to cut the distance between characters that were frequently used together. Typists who could do this would triple their typing speed—the same way that today’s smartphones suggest the next word to type after “Washington” if you’ve entered the character for “George.”

The Chinese typewriter never enjoyed the widespread popularity of its American and European counterparts, but it was widely used in China. It became commonplace in the Reform Era to produce journals that were ‘typed and mimeographed,’ as they were known. These journals were then distributed to the public and used as a way of disseminating information during that turbulent time. But the last Chinese typewriter rolled off an assembly line in 1991, and the challenges of this strange technology were ultimately overtaken by word processors and computers—which are still used in large numbers in present-day China, where hundreds of millions of speakers can be found typing on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.