A Woman Who Invented a Chinese Typewriter

When you think of a Chinese typewriter, you probably imagine a massive machine with thousands of keys and complicated-looking characters. From turn-of-the-century cartoons to MC Hammer’s frenetic typewriter dance, these strange contraptions have long fueled confusion and ridicule.

Yet Chinese typewriters are a lot more than that. Mullaney shows how the machines shaped language and technology.

Lois Lew

One of the most fascinating chapters in Thomas Mullaney’s book “The Chinese Typewriter” is about a typist named Lois Lew. For decades, Lew confidently operated a first-of-its-kind electric Chinese typewriter in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. Mullaney focuses on her remarkable life story, but the book is also about how people use technology and how their embodied experiences impact technological development.

In the 1940s, Chung-Chin Kao partnered with IBM to develop an electric Chinese typewriter. It was a cumbersome machine with a keyboard that had four banks of 0-5 and three of 0-9, and each key corresponded to a four-digit code. Each code was chorded, or mashed together at the same time like a piano chord, to produce characters. Kao desperately needed a typist who could operate the machine in front of audiences in the United States and China, so he hired Lois Lew.

She didn’t have a formal education and was working at an IBM plant in Rochester, New York. Kao was impressed with her skill and her beauty, and he took her on a world tour where she typed in front of crowds of up to 3,000 people. Lew memorized the four-digit codes, transcribed newspaper articles into their corresponding Chinese characters, and inscribed them into the machine without any mistakes—all while looking elegant onstage.

Lew and the machine received rave reviews in America and abroad, and she was featured on the covers of publications including Zhong-Mei Huabao and Municipal Affairs Weekly. She even appeared in a 1947 film. But geopolitics ultimately killed the project. The Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 put a stop to any significant sales, and Kao never got his patent or a large paycheck for his invention.

Lew retired from IBM in the 1960s and went on to open a laundromat. She still swims at the YMCA three hours a week and has vivid memories of her IBM days. She told Mullaney that her one regret is not buying IBM stock when she had the chance. She died at age 96 in 2023. She is survived by her husband, two sons, and four grandchildren.

Thomas Mullaney

For those of us who are a bit too accustomed to the QWERTY keyboards of modern computers and smart phones, the sight of a Chinese typewriter is an unfamiliar one. These baroque metal monsters, with cylinders and wheels and characters arrayed in starbursts or in a massive tray, are simultaneously writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how to organize a language. Because they don’t follow a predictable alphabetic pattern, the characters in Chinese were difficult to mechanize and even harder to understand. Yet over a century of resistance to alphabetic universalism, they have survived and form the linguistic substrate of China’s vibrant world of information technology. Mullaney’s book, which won a 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch award and a Lewis Mumford prize, is not just an object history but grapples with the broad issues of technological change and global communication.

During the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party used its official mouthpieces to celebrate experimental typists like Shen Yunfen, who had been promoted from “first-class hero” to a second-level model worker after she experimented with natural-language arrangements and increased her typing speed from around two thousand to nearly three thousand characters per hour. These typists were at the cutting edge of an emerging system of textual production, which relied on small-scale, independently operated “type-and-copy shops” (dazi tengxieshe) to keep up with the demand for propaganda and other documents.

But these shops also represented a threat to the centrally controlled state apparatus, which depended on centralized command and control to regulate and enforce standards of ideological purity and political correctness. In the years before the revolution, some work units found they were unable to keep up with their production demands using their own pool of typewriters and began outsourcing their work to these unofficial type-and-copy shops.

The typists in these shops were the typists of choice for government officials, military personnel, and scholarly publications. Their typing virtuosity enabled them to prepare crisp and legible copies of policy statements, study guides, statistics, and more, and made it possible for the state to communicate its message to an ever-growing audience.

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang, who was born in China but had a cosmopolitan education that included studies in France and Germany, became an urbane essayist who moved effortlessly between the literary cultures of China and America. He was a witty champion of free speech in an era that was being rocked by emerging totalitarian regimes, and his writing was widely circulated throughout the world. But Lin was more than a cultural go-between; he was also an inventor, and he worked for decades to design a typewriter for Chinese, which is not alphabet-based but depends on thousands of picturelike characters.

Lin’s first attempt at a Chinese typewriter was the Mingkwai, which was introduced to the public in 1947. It looked uncannily like a Sheffield or Imperial typewriter, but it functioned in an entirely different manner. Lin had designed the machine for 22 years, and he spent almost $120,000 on it. But, when he brought the prototype to Remington for a demonstration in front of journalists, the machine failed.

A number of other Chinese-language typewriters had been developed in the 1890s and 1910s, but they were cumbersome to operate. They required a person to memorize the positioning of thousands of symbols and then fill them in by hand. Lin was determined to make a more user-friendly machine, and he hired Europe’s leading typewriter designer of the time to help him.

The Mingkwai was finally ready for a public demonstration in 1948, but the renowned typewriter manufacturer Remington was uninterested in manufacturing it. It feared that a complex machine like the Mingkwai would be too expensive to sell in large numbers.

Although Lin’s writing was hugely influential and popular in the first half of the 20th century, his attempt to develop a Chinese-language typewriter has received relatively little attention. This chapter argues that it’s time to reexamine Lin’s typewriter in order to understand how the project intersected with his larger intellectual goals. Specifically, it suggests that the Mingkwai typewriter provides evidence of an aggressive attempt by Lin to modify and subvert Euro-American Orientalism for Asia’s benefit. It’s a fascinating story, and one well worth reading.

Shu-style typewriter

When it comes to mechanising a writing system, nothing is more challenging than Chinese. Its logographic characters, each of which are made up of a combination of shapes, need to be lined up in specific positions on the typewriter tray and must be arranged in the proper sequence to appear properly on the page. The number of characters needed to create a single word is immense, and a few misplaced letters can break the entire script into unreadable shards.

For these reasons, it took a long time for a typewriter that could handle Chinese to be invented. But when one finally did emerge, it would prove to be revolutionary. The first commercially viable Chinese typewriter was devised by native speakers living abroad. Zhou Houkun, along with linguists like Hu Shih and Y.R. Chao, were part of the second wave of Chinese scholars to study in the US at the turn of the 20th century, financed by war reparations from the US for the Boxer Rebellion.

They returned home to find a nation that had changed profoundly since their departure. China had become a nation, and its new citizens needed to be able to write in its official language. They also needed a way to do so efficiently, ideally on the cheap.

Inventing a machine that could do this required reimagining typewriters in ways that were far beyond what had been imagined for the Western models. The problem was that the hulking machines that had been built for Western languages had a lot of parts and were too large to fit into the space of a small room.

One solution was to prioritise the most common characters, arranging them into three distinct regions on the tray-bed for frequent, less frequent, and rarely used characters. This practice dated back to the Ming dynasty, when it was codified by the Qing-era Kangxi dictionary, which organised more than 40,000 characters into 214 classes of radicals, or recurrent shapes.

The earliest Chinese typewriters, as shown in the photograph above, were built around this idea of sorting characters by frequency and recombinatory radicals. As Mullaney puts it, ‘They resembled mammoth, impractical, breathtaking devices — but were still a world apart from the machines that typists encountered today’.