The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  The Siamese script would need to change as well, alerting us to the fact that this technolinguistic negotiation was by no means a lossless one. Even with its ample 84 keys, Edwin’s brother George later recalled, the Smith Premier machine “lacked two of the number needful to write the complete Siamese alphabet. Do what [Edwin] would, he could not get the whole alphabet and tone marks on the machine [figure 1.5]. So he did a very bold thing; he scrapped two letters of the Siamese alphabet.” “To this day,” he continued, “they are absolutely obsolete.”20

  1.5 Keyboard of Siamese typewriter

  In 1895, loss befell the Siamese royal family and the McFarland clan alike. The designated successor to the Siamese throne, Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis, died of typhoid, whereupon Maha Vajiravudh acceded as the eldest son of King Rama V.21 In the same year, Edwin died an early death as well, exacting an emotional toll on the family, and leaving to his younger brother George the McFarland Siamese Typewriter. “From 1895, the typewriter became a part of the fabric of my life,” George recalled. “On Ed’s death it devolved on me to introduce the use of the Siamese typewriter. He had made it but it was not yet appreciated and wanted.”

  George McFarland was not an inventor. He was a dentist. Deeply embedded in Siamese society like others in his family, he managed the Siriraj Hospital of Siam and established the first private dentistry office in Bangkok circa 1891.22 Here in his office, George placed his late brother’s typewriter on display for his patients as a kind of deeply personal museum exhibit. Perhaps inspired by the curiosity it generated, or by the memory of Edwin, George soon took a much bolder step two years later: he opened a Smith Premier store of his own in Bangkok, thereby continuing the unlikely sisterhood between Syracuse and the Siamese capital.23 “During the next few years,” George recalled, “thousands of these machines were imported and the day came when no Government office felt it could do business without a Smith Premier.”24

  Our Collapsing Technolinguistic Imagination

  The year 1915 marked the second, abrupt turn in the history of Siamese typewriting, and one that would in the end push the McFarland clan out of the typewriter business entirely. This change came, not from dynamics within Siam, but because of corporate maneuvers taking place half a world away in the United States. Having joined the Union Typewriter Company in 1893, a trust corporation that encompassed Caligraph, Densmore, Remington, and Yost typewriters, the Smith Brothers found their profits threatened by the new innovation of “visible typing” pioneered by the Underwood company. Up to this point, leading typewriter models were structured in such a way that the printing surface of the page was not viewable by the typist, being oriented inward toward the machine’s type bars. To examine the text one was typing, a typist needed to lift up the chassis to view the typewritten text. Underwood’s new model boasted a fully visible alternative that met with widespread approval and consumer demand.

  Prevented by trust regulations from making sweeping structural changes to their typewriter, however, the Smith brothers sold all shares in the Smith Premier Typewriter Company, departed from the trust, and reorganized as L. C. Smith & Brothers Typewriters Inc. Their first model—the “Standard”—incorporated visible typing design, and in the process also abandoned their original double-keyboard format, moving to the increasingly dominant single-keyboard, shift-key typewriter form. As a consequence, the global supply of double-keyboard machines dried up—a shift that mattered perhaps little in the English-language market, but one that took out of circulation the device that formed the basis of Siamese typewriting to that point.

  This change was cemented in 1915, when Remington purchased Smith Premier. As George recalled, it was “decreed that no more non-shift typewriters were to be manufactured.”25 This transition was captured in a pair of photographs from the period, the first showing George’s storefront before the acquisition, and the second showing the newest outpost of Remington’s worldwide network (figure 1.6). “It was a particularly dark day for Siam,” George lamented, “because the Smith Premier had been so admirably suited to a language possessing so many characters.”26 As for the new model, “no one wanted it”—“no one knew how to use a shift machine: everyone cried for the old No. 4’s and 5’s. I was at my wits’ end. I did not know what to do.”27

  1.6 The old McFarland store and its Remington Company replacement

  George had little choice but to convert to the cause of shift typewriting or abandon the business altogether. While on furlough, he assisted Remington in developing its first portable Siamese machine. “The little machine was so attractive and convenient,” he later confessed, “that people were induced to try to use a shift machine.”28 The Remington keyboard was adopted eventually by all manufacturers of Siamese typewriters, and at the same time, the models and styles of such machines proliferated along the same lines as those for other languages. Remington soon began marketing a Siamese Portable, a Siamese Standard, and a Siamese Accounting Machine, as well as a network of Siamese typewriting schools centering on the Touch Method—at least one of which was founded and overseen by McFarland himself (figure 1.7).29 The future of Siamese typewriting belonged to the typewriter form made famous by Remington.

  1.7 Siamese typewriter by Remington, manufactured c. 1925 (USA), Peter Mitterhofer Schreibmaschinenmuseum/Museo delle Macchine da Scrivere, Partschins (Parcines), Italy

  With the transition to a single-keyboard design, elements of Siamese writing once considered compatible with the technology of typewriting were suddenly flagged as “problems.” The “characters are so numerous,” remarked Abel Joseph Constant Cousin (1890–1974), inventor and French priest who worked with Remington’s competitor, the Underwood corporation, to develop a new model of Siamese machine.30 This was true not only for Siamese, he felt, but more broadly for “foreign languages of the Asiatic groups.” The “problem was left unsolved,” Cousin claimed in his patent application, “of adapting the Siamese language to a standard typewriter keyboard, which has only 42 keys.” What was required was to “reconcile the discrepancy which exists in the requirements for 94 characters to be typed upon a 42-key-machine, since the latter is capable of operating only two characters for each key, or 84 characters in all.” Certain limitations would need to be observed, however. “The cost of making a small number of enlarged machines sufficient to supply the market,” he explained, “each having many extra types and keys, would be prohibitive, as it would involve practical redesigning of the machine thoroughly and would make it necessary to incur prohibitive outlay for newly designed manufacturing dies, patterns and equipment.” Only by further pruning the Siamese script would it be possible to “bring the typing of Siamese substantially on par with that of modern European languages.”

  This passage by Cousin is revealing for three reasons. First, we see in real time how Siamese script became a “problem,” and how this problem took shape as part of the relationship between Siamese orthography and the shifting grounds of technolinguistic imagination in the world of typewriting. Second, we notice the peculiar way Cousin went about assigning blame for this new “problem.” Namely, for Cousin it was not that the Underwood was incompatible with Siamese, but Siamese that was incompatible with the Underwood. Finally, we notice the broader category Cousin deployed in making his claim about Siamese: the Siamese problem was not restricted to Siamese, in fact, but was instead an instantiation of a broader problem of the “Asiatic”—where “Asiatic” in this usage was effectively synonymous with scripts that exhibited an abundance of orthographic modules exceeding the capacity of his machine.

  When George McFarland published his memoir in 1938, much had changed.31 A small batch of photographs bear witness to this transformation, scarcely larger than postage stamps, printed in vivid black and white, and now housed at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley as part of McFarland’s papers. Two young girls appear in the photographs, kneeling upon the ground and holding up a sign. The sign reads Remington, and flanking it are two other young girls, this pair
wearing neckties, holding a winged Remington typewriter ensconced by a wreath, the machine posed as if flying through the air (figure 1.8).

  1.8 Remington Siamese typewriter event photos

  The wider scene behind the girls encompasses more than twenty-five school-age children, all encircling this homage to the typewriter, in the background standing the equestrian statue of King Rama V and the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall.32

  Siam was now part of the Remington empire.

  “Remington around the World”

  Remington’s acquisition of the McFarland shop on the corner of Burapha and Charoen Krung roads was but one part of a much larger global effort, decades in the making. Remington first presented its new product to the world in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition, although with little fanfare; it was outshone there by Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which captured worldwide attention. It was not until the 1880s and early 1890s that the company measurably increased its reach into markets both at home and overseas. In 1881, the company sold no more than 1,200 machines in all. In 1882, however, the sales agency Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict took over as the company’s sales agency, bringing the device to markets worldwide.33 Direct sales representatives were soon stationed in Germany in 1883, France in 1884, Russia in 1885, the United Kingdom in 1886, Belgium in 1888, Italy in 1889, Holland in 1890, Denmark in 1893, and Greece in 1896. As early as 1897, the company boasted of branches in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lille, Lyons, Nantes, Antwerp, Brussels, Lisbon, Oporto, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, among other European cities; and representatives throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (in locations including Algiers, Tunis, Oran, Alexandria, Cairo, Cape Town, Durban, East London, Johannesburg, Beirut, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Simla, Colombo, Singapore, Rangoon, Manila, Osaka, Hong Kong, Canton, Fuzhou, Macao, Hankou, Tianjin, Beijing, Jiaozhou, Saigon, and Haiphong).34

  In 1897, Remington also began to herald its Number 7 model as the company’s omnilingual flagship, encompassing “every language which uses the Roman characters” as well as Russian, Greek, Armenian, Arabic, and “a complete line of polyglot keyboards.”35 Ten years later, in 1907, the company would release its first front-strike, visible typewriting machine, the Number 10, and in 1915 it was selected as the Official Typewriter for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (which would feature an illustrious Remington Pavilion, and for which all typed official communications were to use Remington machines).36

  Part and parcel of Remington’s ascendancy was the decline and disappearance of those alternate typewriter forms that Edwin McFarland had contemplated not long ago. The diverse ecology of approaches that had once characterized early typewriting steadily thinned out, replaced by a technolinguistic monoculture populated exclusively by varieties of the single-shift design. Double-keyboard machines like those from Edwin and George’s past disappeared entirely from the market, while non-keyboard index machines all but vanished.37 As McFarland’s generation gave way to the next, moreover, new cohorts of inventors chose almost without exception to use the single-shift machine as their mechanical starting point when contemplating the design of foreign-language machines. The single-shift keyboard typewriter became a magnetic core, attracting ever-increasing numbers of patent applications, with Remington and other companies becoming the hubs of global sales, marketing, and distribution networks.

  The globalization of typewriters was a source of immense pride and prestige for these companies. “When travelling, take a portable in your trunk,” one pithy Remington ad read, portraying a caravan of elephant-riding Arab traders tracing a path across an unnamed desert, transporting a small rope-bound load of unmarked wooden crates (figure 1.9).38 “Not everybody knows that there is an organized government in Mongolia,” a Wall Street Journal article read in 1930, “but Remington Rand has filled an order for 500 Remington Typewriters for that government.”39 From its headquarters in Ivrea, the Italian manufacturing firm Olivetti (founded in 1908) shared in this broader discourse of global typewriting. In the pages of Rivista Olivetti, readers learned of the company’s penetration of markets in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. As the company’s report explained, these societies remained charmingly ancient, and yet had also “adapted to modern life.” “It is not without pride,” the story remarked, “that Olivetti contributes to their forward march with its supply of typewriters.”40 Olivetti lauded its creation of an Arabic typewriter as well, assigning to it a practically civilization-shifting impact upon the Arab world. “Yes, for Arabs too have their typewriter,” one Rivista article read, as if in dialogue with an incredulous reader, “and they owe it to the typewriter, which is now daily used by them, if they have been able to free themselves from the last practical difference which they still had with regard to the Europeans” (figure 1.10).41

  1.9 Remington around the world: an advertisement for Remington typewriters

  1.10 Advertisement for Olivetti Arabic typewriter

  The globalization of this technology, coupled with the rise of a technological monoculture, exerted a profound effect on the cultural imaginary of script, technology, and modernity. A typewriter in Cairo would now look, feel, and sound exactly the same as one in Bangkok, New York, or Calcutta—all except for the symbols on each machine’s keyboard. This unified, rat-a-tat cadence of the single-shift typewriter—soon referred to simply as the typewriter—would become part of the soundtrack of a new global modernity.

  The apotheosis of the single-shift machine is best appreciated viscerally by perusing the holdings of some of the world’s most extensive typewriter museums and private collections. Whether at the Peter Mitterhofer Schreibmaschinenmuseum in Partschins, the Musée de la Machine à Écrire in Lausanne, or the Museo della Macchina da Scrivere in Milan, one must practically press his face up to the glass to discern the languages of the machines on display. Hebrew, Russian, Hindi, Japanese kana, Siamese, Javanese, and more are all practically indistinguishable, feeding into a peculiar effect in which language itself seems to be merely a feature or amenity of the machine.42 What emerges is the effect of an omnilingual, omnicompetent, reified ur-typewriter that “comes in” Burmese, Korean, Arabic, Georgian, or Cherokee, the same way that its high-gloss exterior might “come in” black, gray, red, or green.

  To achieve this effect was no small feat, it bears noting. Indeed, the globalization of the single-shift keyboard required nothing short of engineering brilliance. Even as Remington News and Notizie Olivetti blurred the lines between typewriters for Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, French, and Italian, presenting them as identical in every way except for their keyboards, engineers knew better that keyboards alone did not an Arabic, Hebrew, or Russian typewriter make. Keys and keyboards were but the most visible—one might reasonably say superficial—manifestations of a highly technical process of translating the materiality of the English-language machine into forms that could handle other languages and scripts. It was only inside the machine, amid its orchestra of subcomponents, that a typewriter could be said to “have” or “be” language—carriage advance mechanisms, spacing mechanisms, the selective use of dead keys. In fact, for engineers and manufacturers, it was not even in the devices themselves that language lived, but in the casts, dies, molds, presses, lathes, and assembly processes of the factory. More than the Remington typewriter, it was the Remington typewriter factory that constituted English. To translate the English-language Remington machine into Arabic, Khmer, Russian, or Hebrew was, in actuality, to translate the Remington factory itself.

  Just like Edwin McFarland, inventors who set their sights globally confronted different challenges and complexities along the way. Each “problem,” and indeed each trivial adjustment and nonissue, was party to a dialectic between their target script and their technolinguistic starting point, emerging not from any fundamental properties of either the writing system or the machine, but out of the tensions and fortuitous compatibilities that emerged between them.

  In the er
a of Remington, scripts were measured not against the “English language” or the “Latin alphabet” in any abstract sense, but against the concrete, technolinguistic configurations of the single-shift keyboard machine as it had been built for the English language: a limited set of keys, limited capacities of character superimposition, with an equidistant, leftward-advancing carriage. All of these qualities, which perhaps seemed “invisible” and “natural” within the context of English typewriting, became either useful or obstructive properties that had to be reimagined and redesigned, one by one.

  Engagements with exotic writing systems were not simple binaries, then, pitting Self against Other, or alphabetic against nonalphabetic. They involved a complex spectrum along which each of the alphabetic and syllabic scripts of the world were ranked on a scale of greater and lesser compatibility with the modern. At one end was the taken-for-grantedness of the English language, neighbored by those scripts that required of the English typewriter little more than cosmetic adjustments to the keyboard and the key surfaces. In the cases of French, Spanish, and Italian, for example, the fortuitous overlap of alphabets demanded at most a new layout of letters on the keyboard, so as to approximate better their relative frequency in different languages. Russian required only a somewhat more complicated transformation, in this case by outfitting the machine with the Cyrillic alphabet, which numbered a mere 33 letters.