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Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs.^[1] An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters.^[2] Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, following the invention of the Japanese typewriter by Kyota Sugimoto, which used kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system.^[3] At least sixty different models of Chinese typewriter have been produced, ranging from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors.

Zhou–Shu design

A mechanical engineer from Wuxi, Jiangsu named Zhou Houkun (Hou-Kun Chow; 周厚坤; b. 1887) co-invented the first mass-produced Chinese typewriter.^[4] As a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zhou first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter while inspecting American models in Boston. His initial efforts were hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai.^[2]^[5]

Zhou considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for each character. Instead, his design involved a revolving cylinder that contained the characters ordered by radical and stroke count, like in a Chinese dictionary. Zhou completed an initial prototype in 1914, and by 1916 he had attracted interest from the media and potential manufacturers.^[6] However, his design was heavy at 18 kg (40 lb), which was later reduced to about 14 kg (31 lb).^[2] The Commercial Press had obtained the rights to his machine and possession of the prototype by 1919.^[7] Following improvements to the design by an engineer working for the Commercial Press named Shu Changyu (舒昌鈺), which included replacing the cylinder with a flat bed customizable by typists, the model entered mass production in 1919.^[8]

Zhou expected his typewriter to be used in Chinese offices where multiple copies of documents would have to be made, and by Chinese living in foreign countries without access to skilled writers of Chinese.^[2]

IBM and Kao's electric design

On 28 June 1944, Chung-Chin Kao (高仲芹; b. 1906), an inventor at IBM, applied for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for his electric Chinese typewriter, and was issued US patent number 2412777 for his invention on 17 December 1946.^[9]^[10] The typewriter employed 36 keys divided across four banks. The first bank had six keys numbered 0 through 5; the other three each had 10 keys numbered 0 through 9. To type a character, the operator was required to simultaneously select one key from each of the four banks. Each of those four-digit combinations corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, or other symbols such as punctuation marks, which were etched onto the surface of a revolving drum inside the typewriter. The drum had a diameter of 7 inches, a length of 11 inches, and made a complete revolution once per second, allowing the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute.^[11]

Wanneng and Double Pigeon models

Chinese typewriters made in Japan entered the market in the 1920s, with the Wanneng (万能) brand, introduced by the Nippon Typewriter Company in 1940 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, becoming the de facto standard. After Japan's defeat and the subsequent nationalization of typewriter companies by the Communist government, locally made models based on the Wanneng continued to dominate the market, particularly the Double Pigeon (双鸽; Shuānggē).^[12]

MingKwai design

The inventor, linguist, and author Lin Yutang (1895–1976) filed a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for an electric typewriter for Chinese on 17 April 1946, which was granted on 14 October 1952.^[13] Lin called his typewriter design "MingKwai", derived from the characters 明 (míng) and 快 (kuài), meaning 'clear' and 'quick' respectively.^[14]

Lin had a prototype machine custom built by the Carl E. Krum Company, a small engineering-design consulting firm with an office in New York City. That multilingual typewriter was the size of a conventional office typewriter of the 1940s. It measured 36 cm × 46 cm × 23 cm (14.2 in × 18.1 in × 9.1 in). The typefaces fit on a drum. A "magic eye" was mounted in the center of the keyboard which magnifies and allows the typist to review a selected character.^[15] Characters are selected by pressing two keys to choose a desired character, which is arranged according to the system Lin devised for his Chinese-language dictionary, which lexicographically orders characters using thirty geometric shapes or strokes as tokens, akin to letters in an alphabet. This system broke with the long-standing system of radicals and stroke order as a means of indexing characters. The selected Chinese character appeared in the magic eye for preview,^[15] the typist then pressed a "master" key, similar to today's computer function key. The typewriter could create 90000 distinct characters using either one or two of six character-containing rollers, which in combination has 7000 full characters and 1,400 character radicals or partial characters.^[15]

Lin's typewriter was not produced commercially. When Lin's daughter Lin Tai-yi was to demonstrate use of the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company, they could not make it work.^[16] Though the machine was fixed for a press conference the next day, no further progress was made in attracting potential manufacturers. Lin had by then acquired considerable debt.^[17]

The Mergenthaler Linotype Company bought the rights for the typewriter from Lin in 1948. The Cold War had begun and the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to research cryptography and machine translation. The United States Air Force acquired the keyboard to study machine translation and disk storage for rapid access to large quantities of information. The Air Force then handed the keyboard to Gilbert W. King, the director of research at IBM. King moved to Itek and authored a seminal scientific paper on machine translation. He also unveiled the Sinowriter, a device for converting Chinese-character texts into machine input codes for processing Chinese into English.^[18]

Cultural and technological impact

According to Thomas S. Mullaney, it is possible that development of modern Chinese typewriters in the 1960s and 1970s influenced the development of modern computer word processors and even affected the development of computers themselves. In the 1950s, typists came to rearrange the character layout from the standard dictionary layout to groups of common words and phrases.^[19] Chinese typewriter engineers were trying to make the most common characters accessible at the fastest speed possible by autocompletion, a technique used today in input methods for many languages, not only Chinese.^[15] This arrangement was called the 'associative' (联想; 聯想; liánxiǎng) layout, similar to predictive text, and sped typing speeds from about 20 words per minute to around 80.^[19]

The Chinese typewriter has become a metaphor for absurdity, complexity and backwardness in Western popular culture. One such example is MC Hammer's dance move named after the Chinese typewriter in the music video for "U Can't Touch This". The move, with its fast-paced and large gestures, supposedly resembles a person working on a huge, complex typewriter.^[20]

The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company [zh] in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".^[21] The last Chinese typewriters were completed around 1991.^[19] Stone developed software based on Alps Electric custom-made 8088 based hardware^[22]^{[better source needed]} with a dot matrix printer from Brother Industries, distributed by Mitsui, to print Chinese characters, and released the system as the MS-2400.^[15]^[23]