The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

From turn-of-the-century cartoons to MC Hammer’s frenetic dance routine, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity and confusion. But despite their complexity, they have also inspired some fascinating engineering solutions.

From Manhattan to Shanghai, Lois Lew confidently operated a first-of-its-kind Chinese typewriter in presentations. How did she do it?

Lois Lew

The Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine. As Thomas Mullaney explains, “On the keyboard affixed to the hulking gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four groups. Each key represented a combination of four-digit codes that corresponded to Chinese characters. Typewriters of the day did not allow for error correction, so typists were expected to function as human Input Method Editors, able to decipher the symbols on screen and translate them into their corresponding codes, without referring to a code book.”

Kao needed a typist who could operate his first-of-its-kind machine with aplomb in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai.” Lew was a factory worker who had no formal education. But Kao knew that Lew had a knack for memorizing. He put her on the typewriter’s tour itinerary after his initial candidate, a college-educated woman, dropped out of the picture.

For the next seven decades, Lew transcribed passages from newspapers (each with hundreds of characters) into their corresponding four-digit codes, then entered them into the machine without making a single mistake. She did so blindly, without the benefit of a “pop-up menu” like we enjoy on computers today.

The story of Lew’s typewriter prowess is just one chapter in Mullaney’s new book, The Chinese Computer: How an Improbable American Woman Mastered a Formidable Early Computer and Changed the World. The book is an ambitious attempt to depict the complexities of how we use technology, but also the ways that people’s embodied experiences and practices with objects shape technological development.

Despite its complexity, the Chinese typewriter’s fate was ultimately determined by geopolitics. As the Communist revolution swept through China, IBM’s fears about a potential loss of market share in the country proved justified. The typewriter’s inventor, Chung-Chin Kao, a Chinese American who had become a citizen of the United States, was declared an enemy of the state and forced to leave the country in 1964. It was at this point that the improbable American woman who mastered the Chinese typewriter would have to step in to fill her shoes. This is a remarkable and important story.

Chung-Chin Kao

In addition to her work on the Chinese typewriter, Kao patented several other electro-mechanical devices, including a meteorological machine USPN 2,402,777 (1944), a copy holder for stenography USPN 2617386A (1949), and a Japanese language telegraph printer USPN 2,723,517A (1953). These inventions demonstrate her keen understanding of mechanical systems as well as the Chinese script. She is the first woman to be recognized as an inventor in China.

When many Westerners think of a Chinese typewriter, they imagine a massive device with thousands of keys and a ginormous keyboard. These ideas, however, aren’t entirely accurate. Real Chinese typewriters actually looked quite different, and were much smaller than the ones in cartoons and MC Hammer videos. In fact, they were small enough to fit on a table.

During the Republican era, two Chinese inventors produced the first commercially manufactured Chinese typewriter. One was Zhou Houkun, who designed a prototype in the 1910s and worked with executives from Commercial Press to develop a marketable version. The other was Shu Zhendong, who produced the “Shu-Style” Chinese typewriter.

The “Shu-Style” Chinese typewriter was not only a breakthrough in design, but it also had a huge impact on the world of technology. It was a symbol of globalization and modernity that was accessible to all classes, and it profoundly changed the way people lived their lives. It also impacted the way they interacted with each other.

To produce a character on the Chinese typewriter, typists would depress a total of four keys at once, one from each bank. This was a difficult task that required immense skill and patience. The machine was also prone to errors, so it was important to double check your work carefully before you committed it to paper.

The Chinese typewriter was eventually replaced by new technologies, such as word processors and computers, but the challenge that it represented still lives on. In fact, it is the same challenge that faces engineers and linguists working on new text input systems for smartphones, tablets, and personal computers. Whether they realize it or not, they are still grappling with the question of how to fit tens of thousands of Chinese characters on an easy-to-use device.

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was a renowned Chinese author, poet and translator who played an important role in bridging eastern and western cultures. He is also the inventor of the Mingkuai Chinese typewriter. Lin described himself as having a “western mind and a Chinese soul” and his legacy continues to live on today in both China and America. There are numerous academic studies devoted to Lin’s life and work, including Diran John Sohigian’s biography of Lin (Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation, 1991), Jing Tsu’s Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Xie Yun’s Lin Yutang in Modern Times (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Because written Chinese is a logographic language rather than an alphabetic one, it was more difficult to adapt traditional printing technologies to use the language. It was not until the early twentieth century that a Chinese typewriter was invented.

The first prototype was built by Zhou Houkun in the 1920s and used a standard English-language typewriter to type Chinese characters. It was an expensive and bulky machine that could only print two thousand characters at a time. Zhou’s work was built upon by Shu Zhendong to create a more compact and functional device, the first commercially manufactured Chinese typewriter.

There have been dozens of different models of Chinese typewriters, each with its own unique features and capabilities. These machines range from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors. As of 1991, however, the last Chinese typewriter rolled off the production line. The technology was eventually replaced by new technologies, such as word processors and computers.

In the late nineteenth century, Lin became fascinated with the writing and publishing processes of western culture. He wrote several books on the subject and translated many literary works into Chinese. As a writer, he was particularly interested in the concept of humor. He introduced the Chinese term for humor, youmo, into the world of literature. This helped popularize the concept of humor in both China and the West.

In 1966, Lin Yutang left America to return to Taiwan, where he resumed his writing in Chinese after thirty years of writing only in English. He published the Anglo-Chinese Dictionary of Current Usage and composed numerous other essays. Lin died in 1976 at the age of eighty-one.

Thomas Mullaney

In a era when most of us use smartphones to communicate, the esoteric machines that powered China’s revolutionary newspapers and reform-era literary journals have been all but forgotten. But Stanford University historian Thomas Mullaney is trying to give them their due. He’s become an expert on, collector of, and evangelist for Chinese typewriters. He’s even given lectures on them at Google and around Silicon Valley.

These contraptions resemble a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press. They have no keys, just thousands of tiny metal characters arranged on a grid system. Typists had to memorize the general locations of each character — about 2,500 on a typical machine. Typists also had to master a set of repetitive drills, such as xue-sheng and yin-wei, that helped imprint the characters into their brains. These drills helped typists remember, if not the exact x-y coordinates of each character, then the geometric patterns of characters that tended to go together in writing.

Despite the formidable challenge, Chinese typewriters were enormously successful in the early 20th century. They were able to handle unprecedented workloads during China’s many political campaigns of the time, including the massive propaganda campaign that led up to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The machines were used to produce everything from political pamphlets to government reports and legal documents, and they played a vital role in the nation’s transformation from a semi-feudal empire into one of the world’s most powerful economies.

But the last of these machines rolled off the assembly line in 1991. They were replaced by more modern technologies, such as word processors and computers. Nevertheless, the challenges and innovations pioneered by these typists lived on in a variety of ways. For example, the predictive text techniques developed by Chinese typists became the basis of the Chinese personal computer manufacturer Lianxiang (or, as it prefers to be known in English, Lenovo). And a few of the old Chinese typing systems have influenced the pronunciation-led input methods that now power a billion Chinese people’s phones and computers.