The Chinese Typewriter A History
The Chinese Typewriter A History by Thomas S. Mullaney, published by MIT Press on October 9, 2018, is a comprehensive exploration of the evolution of Chinese typewriters and their impact on information technology in China. This 500-page reprint delves into the unique challenges posed by the character-based Chinese writing system in contrast to alphabetic systems like the QWERTY keyboard. Mullaney examines a century-long journey filled with experiments, prototypes, and innovations that ultimately led to the development of functional Chinese typewriters.
Readers will find a detailed account of the various attempts to create a workable typewriter for Chinese characters, including early imaginative designs and practical inventions. The book highlights significant milestones, such as the first Chinese typewriter created by a Christian missionary and the subsequent evolution of typewriting practices in Chinese offices. Mullaney also discusses the emergence of input methods that paved the way for predictive text, illustrating how Chinese characters not only overcame the challenges posed by alphabetic systems but also laid the groundwork for modern Chinese information technology.
Official synopsis Publisher
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China’s information technology successes today.
Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.
The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. One of the first Chinese typewriters actually constructed was invented by a Christian missionary, who organized characters by common usage (but promoted the less-common characters for “Jesus” to the common usage level). Later came typewriters manufactured for use in Chinese offices, and typewriting schools that turned out trained “typewriter girls” and “typewriter boys.” Still later was the “Double Pigeon” typewriter produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, the typewriter of choice under Mao. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an input method that was the first instance of “predictive text.”
Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an “object history” but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.
A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Columbia University
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