Lois Lew, the Woman Who mastered the Early 5400-character IBM Chinese Typewriter
While texts in English and other languages could be whacked out with typewriters, Chinese characters proved infinitely more difficult to mechanize. Yet typists kept working at it.
Whether at a typing bureau in a downtown Beijing office or the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, people are typing in Chinese every second of every day. It’s a feat that has roots in the work of a surprisingly improbable woman named Lois Lew.
Lois Lew
Thomas Mullaney, a Stanford University professor, has a new post on Fast Company about Lois Lew, a remarkable woman who mastered the early 5400-character IBM Chinese typewriter and demonstrated it for the world in 1947. It’s a wonderful story of how she learned to use the behemoth machine, but it also offers a glimpse into a fascinating time in the history of computing, when various efforts were made to mechanize the writing system of China.
When the IBM Chinese typewriter was unveiled, inventor Chung-Chin Kao needed someone who could demonstrate the device in America and in China—and who spoke both English and Chinese. He turned to Lew, who worked at an IBM plant in Rochester, NY, and was a native-born Chinese speaker. She spent a week holed up in a hotel room memorizing the most common four-key codes, and then set off on the road with Kao.
The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine, not something that anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film (who, by the way, is portrayed as a white American). Affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis were 36 keys, which produced up to 5,400 characters, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.
Lew transcribed newspaper articles, translated passages (each with hundreds of individual Chinese characters), and inputted the four-digit codes into the machine. She did it all with consummate ease, and she did it in front of crowds that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands.
Mullaney writes that Lew’s skills were widely covered in publications, from Zhong-Mei Huabao to IBM promotional brochures and a 1947 movie, and that publishers were clearly enamored of her beauty: She appears frequently in these articles and is photographed in the most flattering lighting.
But, despite the widespread press coverage and her brilliant performance in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai, Kao would never sell his machine in significant numbers. The reason was geopolitics: Mao’s rise threw the entire Chinese market into turmoil, and IBM quickly withdrew its investment.
Her Story
When she was 16, Zhang Haiyan saw her first Chinese typewriter. It was a sight to behold, an immense, gunmetal gray beast with 36 keys. These keys were the keys to a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems. Adding Chinese characters to a typewriter represented a significant technological and sociocultural challenge, but also held the promise of enormous productivity gains for millions of factory workers. For decades, engineers and typists from within China and beyond were locked in a desperate race to develop a machine that could handle this massive task.
Aside from its size, the machine was not much like a standard QWERTY keyboard. Instead of letters, the keys were arranged in two sets, one for uppercase and one for lowercase characters, with additional keys to indicate numeric values. Typists moved a tray bed of character “slugs” with their left hand, then positioned a mechanical arm over top of a desired slug and pressed a key with their right hand. This process, known as hunt-and-peck typing, involved a great deal of dexterity and mental arithmetic.
In the process, typists learned to memorize, if not the precise x-y coordinates of each character, then at least general ‘neighborhoods’ on the tray bed, where the characters tended to cluster together. In the end, however, it remained a very challenging, tedious, and time-consuming task for even the most skilled typists.
Eventually, Zhou Houkun developed a prototype for a system that would let typists enter Chinese characters into a word processor without ever having to look at the tray bed. His work, along with the efforts of other inventors, led to a breakthrough that finally made it possible for Chinese speakers to draft business documents on desktop computers.
Today, few Chinese people ever see a traditional Chinese typewriter. Most of them, in fact, type on their smartphones and tablets using a system that is fundamentally different from the ancient hunt-and-peck method of typing. But the story of how we came to this point is an interesting one—not only for Chinese linguistics and engineering, but also for the history of technology and globalization, mass mobilization and literacy, women’s roles in industry, science and technology, and cultural work.
The Chinese Typewriter
For years, Mullaney has been an evangelist for Chinese typewriters. Since snagging his first one at a flea market in 2008, he has collected about 12 machines (about four times as many as China’s sole typewriter museum). He lectures about them around Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area, and he argues that these misunderstood contraptions, long dismissed as less practical than alphabetic typewriters, actually pioneered smartphone-era technologies such as predictive text and autocomplete.
A Chinese typewriter is uncanny in appearance, resembling a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press. The machine’s flat bed is studded with 2,500 metal characters that are not arranged in an alphabetical order but instead follow a complex grid system. Typists had to memorize the location of each character, and they were expected to be able to churn out a great volume of work in a short time.
Chinese inventors struggled to create a machine that could handle the language’s complex character sets and linguistic structure. They experimented with different mechanisms and keyboards, with a goal of producing a commercially viable device that was both user-friendly and fast.
By the 1940s, several inventors had produced prototypes for Chinese typewriters. Some had patents from the US, including the inventor of the machine that Lew used: Lin Yutang. The Chinese typewriter entered its heyday during the Maoist period, with the ‘Double Pigeon’-brand machine being one of the most popular models.
The device was so powerful in its ability to produce large volumes of propaganda and other documents quickly, that it became a tool for censorship. For example, a disgruntled navy lieutenant once used a Chinese typewriter to send Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, an anonymous letter detailing her humiliating romantic history. The letter caused her to faint and prompted a government investigation, which ultimately led to the conviction of the sender.
Today, the Chinese typewriter is a reminder of a moment in modern Chinese history when the country’s governing ideology was still being developed and tested. It is also a testament to the Chinese people’s ingenuity in solving the difficult design challenge of fitting tens of thousands of Chinese characters into a desktop device.
Thomas Mullaney
Thomas Mullaney is an American sinologist, Guggenheim fellow, and Professor of History at Stanford University where he researches Chinese history, technology, and race. His work focuses on the historical connections between writing systems, technology, and the formation of modern China. He is the author of two full-length monographs and five edited books as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and digital humanities projects. His book, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, won the 2011 American Historical Association Pacific Branch award for “Best First Book on Any Subject” and was honored with the Lewis Mumford Prize.
His second book, The Chinese Computer (MIT Press, 2019), traces the emergence of electronic Chinese input methods and charts the circuitous paths and eccentric personalities that led to them. It is the first comprehensive account of China’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of a nonalphabetic information infrastructure that encompassed telegraphy, typewriting, word processing, and computing. His research draws on a wide range of multilingual archival, oral histories, and material object sources across the globe. He is also an active participant in the Digital Humanities community and has given invited lectures on Chinese computing at Google, Microsoft, and the Unicode Consortium.
