The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  Returning to Tap-Key and his monstrous machine, we are immediately struck by the dehumanizing and exoticizing caricatures. What concerns us primarily here, however, is not the charged racism of this imagery, but another aspect that easily escapes notice. In each of these many portrayals of the mythological Chinese machine, one invariably encounters massive keyboards with thousands upon thousands of keys. The question we will ask in this chapter is, quite simply: Why keys? Why did Stellman call his fictional protagonist Tap-Key? Why, when Bill Bryson imagined a Chinese typewriter, did his mind turn to a fifteen-by-five-foot keyboard? Why is it that, for us in the present day, as for those in 1900, simply to hear the words “Chinese typewriter” brings to mind a monstrous Rube Goldberg contraption featuring an immense keyboard upon which each of the language’s tens of thousands of characters is assigned its own dedicated key? If it “makes the mind dizzy to think what a Chinese typewriter must be,” where does our mental dizziness come from exactly?

  A tempting reaction to this question would be to invoke “common sense”: typewriters are, by definition, machines with keys and keyboards, making it perfectly natural that our minds should turn to such metaphors when imagining a Chinese “version” of this device. We could take this logic further, in fact, and contemplate all of the many subtle properties that we associate with the typewriter, often without realizing it. Visualizing a mechanical English-language machine in our minds, we might depress the key marked “A” and watch as the machine impresses the corresponding letter on the page, in lowercase. Automatically, the carriage advances one space, horizontally and to the left. If we depress the key marked “L,” the carriage advances again, exactly the same distance, despite the difference in width of the letters “l” and “a.” Our hands and fingers, poised above the keyboard, are also worthy of note. The very form of the machine enforces a visceral distinction between the different “strengths” of the digits of the hand: the pinky is weak, and the forefinger strong. We press the carriage return, the platen rotates a set distance, and the machine sails back across your line of sight, once again horizontally, but this time to the right. Such is the “essence” of the typewriter.

  However commonsensical all of these qualities might sound to us now, none of them were predestined to become part of our taken-for-granted understanding. Were we to conduct the same thought experiment circa 1880, at a time when typewriting was a novel arena of practice still very much in formation, many more images would have come to mind—most of which have since left our collective memory. In the early years of American and European typewriting, as we will see, there were many different types of typewriters that did not necessarily contain the features we now consider part of the typewriter’s inherent essence. Some machines were designed to be operated using only one hand, as with the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, designed by Danish inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–1890) and famously owned by Friedrich Nietzsche during the 1880s to compose letters during a time of rapidly declining health. Others arrayed the letters of the alphabet around a swiveling circular plate, as in the Lambert typewriter of 1904. Still others had no keys or keyboards at all, as with the American Visible Typewriter of 1891. Indeed, only one form of typewriter embodied all of the features we now consider the sine qua non of typewriting.8 This was the keyboard-based, single-shift machine. The Remington, the Underwood, the Olivetti.

  Returning to Tap-Key and the imaginary Chinese typewriter, then, this chapter mounts a counterintuitive argument: when we view denigrating cartoons of monstrous Chinese machines, or seemingly neutral statements about Chinese technolinguistic “inefficiency,” we are in fact staring at the death mask of our own once vibrant technolinguistic imagination—the collapse of a once rich ecology of both machines and ways of thinking about machines that has since disappeared into the monoculture of the Remington world. In the wake of this collapse, and in the context of the Remington monoculture, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine anything other than keys and keyboards—and thus to imagine anything but monstrous Chinese absurdities equipped with thousands of keys. The Chinese monster in our minds is not a static image, that is to say—a photograph in an album that we retrieve and contemplate from time to time. It is the outcome of a kind of mental program that is occasionally jolted from dormancy and allowed to run its course. The program runs as follows:

  A typewriter is an object with keys.

  Each of these keys corresponds to one letter in the alphabet.

  Chinese possesses no alphabet, but rather entities called “characters.”

  There are tens of thousands of characters in Chinese.

  A Chinese typewriter must be an enormous device with many thousands of keys.

  Every time it is initiated, this conceptual algorithm guides its thinker to the same invariant conclusion, all while producing the belief that he or she has arrived at this conclusion spontaneously and autonomously. The immensity of the Chinese typewriter is not something that must be ruminated upon. Rather, it feels true because it simply insists. It is this conceptual algorithm, and not the Chinese language, that is a cause of our dizziness.

  The “Chinese typewriter” as monstrous Other was, in this way, the byproduct of a collapsing technolinguistic imagination in twentieth-century America and Western Europe. It derived from popular notions of Chinese exoticness and alterity, to be sure, but much more importantly from emergent and often unconscious beliefs about what constituted the “normal” relationship between language and machines in the alphabetic world. To understand our imagined Chinese typewriter, then, we must pay less attention to the “Chinese” part of this dyad, I argue, and far more to early Western conceptions of the “typewriter” itself—for it was through machines like the typewriter that many in the Euro-American world came to form deep-seated opinions about their own languages, as well as non-Western, non-Latin, and especially nonalphabetic scripts. We must dig deep into the history by which “keyboards” and “keys” became inseparable from our understanding of “typewriter.”

  Once we understand where this idea of the Chinese typewriter-as-monstrosity comes from, we are in a position to appreciate the potent ideological work it has performed over the course of its long career. Stipulating that Louis Stellman, Bill Bryson, Tom Selleck, and MC Hammer are not high on the list of individuals we often turn to for insight into the history of China, or the global history of modern information technology, nevertheless I argue that there is profound analytical value in understanding the process by which diverse groups of individuals can, when presented with the words “Chinese typewriter,” consistently arrive at more or less the same monstrous and absurd outcome. This mental algorithm is a site of acute importance, for it is within this algorithm that we find insight into a central question of our larger story: the historical process by which longstanding nineteenth-century critiques of Chinese writing managed to survive the decline of those evolutionist and social Darwinist arguments on which they had, for more than a century, been based. The image of the absurd Chinese keyboard is thus neither frivolous nor innocuous. It is the successor to a discourse that in the previous century had been rooted squarely in notions of racial hierarchy and evolutionism. More than successor, in fact, this technological monster rehabilitated and rejuvenated Orientalist discourses, insofar as calls for the abolition of Chinese characters in the twentieth century and beyond have no longer needed to traffic in gauche, bloodstained references to Western cultural superiority or the evolutionary unfitness of Chinese script. Now the same arguments could be made more forcefully through the sanitized, neutral, and supposedly objective language of comparative technological fitness. After all, if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two Ping-Pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?

  Before we move on to examine real Chinese information technologies beginning in the next chapter, then, it is vital for us to examine the history of the illusory ones, for in this history there emerged a pervasive and pow
erful interpretive framework from which real Chinese information technologies—real Chinese typewriters, in particular—never escaped over the course of their own histories. This history of our collapsing technolinguistic imaginary took place across four phases: an initial period of plurality and fluidity in the West in the late 1800s, in which there existed a diverse assortment of machines through which engineers, inventors, and everyday individuals could imagine the very technology of typewriting, as well as its potential expansion to non-English and non-Latin writing systems; second, a period of collapsing possibility around the turn of the century in which a specific typewriter form—the shift-keyboard typewriter—achieved unparalleled dominance, erasing prior alternatives first from the market and then from the imagination; next, a period of rapid globalization from the 1900s onward in which the technolinguistic monoculture of shift-keyboard typewriting achieved global proportions, becoming the technological benchmark against which was measured the “efficiency” and thus modernity of an ever-increasing number of world scripts; and, finally, the machine’s encounter with the one world script that remained frustratingly outside its otherwise universal embrace: Chinese. Across this history, we will see how the rise of Remington in particular transformed the material, conceptual, and financial departure points for all subsequent thinking about typewriting for the world’s languages. When Remington conquered the world, it was not “the typewriter” in any abstract sense that made its way into practically every corner of the globe—it was specifically the single-shift keyboard that achieved global saturation. This particular type of typewriter became the machine against which every writing system in the world would be measured, with profound implications for every one of them it absorbed—even more so for the one writing system it could not.

  Asia before Remington

  Our history of Tap-Key and the imaginary Chinese typewriter begins, not in China nor in the United States, but in Siam. Here, in the year 1892, the first Siamese typewriter was invented by Edwin Hunter McFarland, second of four children of Samuel Gamble and Jane Hays McFarland.9 Before their children’s birth, the McFarlands had put down roots in Siam and established the family as missionaries, doctors, educators, and philanthropists with access to the highest rungs of elite society.10 Edwin graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1884, and returned to Siam to serve as the private secretary of Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, son to Mongkut King Rama IV, and half-brother of Chulalongkorn King Rama V.11 In 1891, Prince Damrong dispatched Edwin to the United States with a very particular charge: to develop a typewriter for the Siamese script, just one of the court’s many reform and modernization initiatives.12

  Edwin enjoyed considerable resources in accomplishing this task. He had trained with his father in the art of printing, and could draw upon his father’s work on the first printed dictionary of the Siamese language.13 Even more importantly, Edwin had at his disposal a much wider array of approaches to the question of typewriting than would be true only a few decades later. At a time before Western typewriters had settled into the form we now take for granted, Edwin had before him different types of typewriters to choose from, each offering a different starting point from which to engage with this exotic, non-Latin script.

  As he contemplated the written Siamese language, with its forty-four consonants, thirty-two vowels, five tones, ten numerals, and eight punctuation marks, Edwin would have encountered three typewriter paradigms, each presenting different affordances and limitations. One option was the index typewriter, a form of typewriter that did not have keys or a keyboard, but instead employed a flat or circular plate upon which the letters of the alphabet were etched. Using a pointer, the typist operated the machine by moving the pointer to the desired character, and then depressing a type mechanism.14 The earliest known index machines were the Hughes Typewriter for the Blind (1850), the Circular Index (c. 1860, maker unknown), and the Hall Typewriter, developed in 1881 by the American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Hall. One of the advantageous features of index machines was the interchangeability of types, fonts, and thus languages—a feature that inventors and entrepreneurs celebrated and promoted to potential customers. Like his contemporaries, Hall had global ambitions for his invention, setting out to internationalize the machine practically as soon as the first model was released in Salem, Massachusetts. As early as 1886, Hall began to promote his interchangeable typewriter plates for Armenian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

  For Edwin’s purposes, Hall’s machine had its limitations, however. Like other American typewriter inventors, Hall thought almost exclusively in terms of Western European writing systems—whether Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic—formatting each of his interchangeable metal plates with the same eight-by-nine matrix format. With a total of seventy-two possible symbols, Hall’s machine served such languages as Italian and Russian quite well, but fell just short of the number required for Siamese.15

  A second option was the single-shift keyboard typewriter, exemplified in the manufactures of the Remington Typewriter Company. Founded by Eliphalet Remington in 1816, the company began life as a Civil War–era weapons manufacturer based in Ilion, New York. As the cataclysmic war came to an end, and as the United States entered the postbellum period, Remington set out to reallocate its efforts, collaborating with the typewriter companies Yost and Densmore, and the inventors Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Lewis. In 1873, Remington debuted the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. This single-keyboard system featured an interface upon which each key corresponded to both the lower- and uppercase versions of each letter. The operator could toggle between cases using the now familiar “shift” key.

  The limitations of the Remington device would also have been apparent to Edwin, however. In English, there is a sharp distinction in terms of frequency between lowercase and uppercase letters, one that made it eminently reasonable to sequester uppercase letters to the harder-to-reach “shift” level. In English, capital letters constitute between 2 and 5 percent of all printed matter, with lowercase letters accounting for most of the balance. Out of the 2,641,527 letters that constitute Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, only 14,177 or 2.56 percent are capital letters. Melville’s Moby-Dick exhibits only a slightly higher percentage of 2.91 percent. Ulysses by James Joyce and Shakespeare’s Hamlet fall toward the outer bound of capitalization, ranking at 4.58 percent and 5.61 percent, respectively.16 By offloading these little-used uppercase letters to secondary “shift” keys, typewriters could be reduced in size, without affecting ease of use or output.

  The same could not be said of Siamese, whose alphabet does not distinguish between lower- and uppercase forms. As such the “shift” function of the single-keyboard machine would have required Edwin to relegate half of the Siamese alphabet to the more cumbersome, two-stroke operation. This was certainly possible, but far from opportune.

  A third option, and the one that Edwin ultimately chose, was the double-keyboard machine designed by the Smith Premier Typewriter Company. Alexander T. Brown, an inventor from Cortland, New York, had founded the company in 1880 when, like his counterparts at Remington, he teamed up with the weapons manufacturer Lyman C. Smith. In a machine shop in Syracuse, they worked on the typewriter, and eventually made it a primary focus of their business. Indeed, thanks to the immense plant they constructed at 700 East Water Street, Syracuse came to be known by many as “Typewriter City.” The company’s flagship model at the time was the Number 4, with which Smith Premier established itself as the leader in double-keyboard or “complete keyboard” machines, as the manufacturers themselves referred to their design.17 With 84 keys on the keyboard, the double-keyboard machine “provides a key for every character,” the company’s advertisements boasted, enabling greater accuracy than its shift-keyboard counterpart, saving time for the operator, and prolonging the life of the apparatus (insofar as there was no “shift” key that would shoulder the burden of heavy usage, and wear down or
break in the process). “In a shift-key machine,” the Smith Premier company explained, “there is danger of error, the operator taking the hand out of its natural field to depress the shift-key.”18

  When it came time for Edwin to finalize a manufacturing agreement, it was in Syracuse, and not at the factories of Hall or Remington, that he found the best fit for the needs of Siam’s modernization efforts (figure 1.4). Siam was to be Smith Premier country.

  1.4 The Smith Premier double-keyboard typewriter

  Having chosen his technolinguistic starting point, Edwin now needed to work with engineers to revisit some of the integral design principles of the machine to bring it into compliance with the specifications of Siamese writing. One of the primary requirements was to retrofit the machine with a greater number of so-called “dead keys,” a technical term referring to keys that do not advance the platen after an impression is made. Equipped with such dead keys, Edwin’s retrofitted Smith Premier would thus be capable of handling Siamese accents, first registering an accent and then superimposing the letter.19 Having built up the letter, the carriage then advanced to type the next one.