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
