The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  At the other end of the spectrum, however, were arrayed those scripts whose technolinguistic performance demanded much more challenging engagements. The plasticity and universality of the typewriter form was tested to a far greater extent by Hebrew and Arabic, for example. These scripts demanded all of the more facile changes considered thus far—new letter frequency analyses, font-creation, the resurfacing of the keyboard—but also more complex shape-shifting. In Hebrew, the operative difference that concerned engineers was not the difference of alphabet, but the right-to-left directionality of the script. In a machinic sense, Hebrew was English backward, with engineers concentrating their attention upon what they saw as the salient part of the English-language machine in need of modification: the carriage-advancing mechanism. In 1909, Samuel A. Harrison filed a patent for an “Oriental Type-writer,” which would be based upon the American-built Yost machine. Harrison’s patent focused exclusively on adjusting the Yost typewriter such that “by a certain adjustment the same operating device will cause the relative advancement … to be reversed whereby the feed of the member that is advanced is in the opposite direction.”43 “By this means,” Harrison explained, “the typebar or type-carrying mechanism can carry two or more different alphabets, one of which such as the English is printed from left to right on the paper” while for the other “the printing will read in the reverse direction from right to left; as for instance the Hebrew language.”44 In 1913, London-based inventor Richard A. Spurgin accomplished the same, this time as assignor to the Hammond Typewriter company. Beginning with the Hammond machine, he focused his efforts on creating a “reversible carriage” for “Hebrew and those languages that require the operation of the machine in a manner reverse to that of our language.”45

  In creating these slightly revised machines, Western designers and manufacturers reopened certain “black boxes” within the structure and behavior of the English-language device—in this case, the otherwise taken-for-granted mechanism of leftward carriage advance. The typewriter form here had to grow, as it were, to encompass its mirror image, wherein the depression of keys triggered a rightward rather than leftward movement, and the “return” key initiated the opposite. In the legal realm, this required the filing of new patents and the drafting of appropriately worded explanations of the mechanism. In the realm of manufacturing, it required the adjustment of dies and molds, those negative spaces that would be used to manufacture the new Hebrew “version” of the typewriter form. Through the course of these adjustments, however, engineers had to take great care. The starting “typewriter-self” could be stretched and twisted, certainly, but engineers had to take pains not to stretch or twist it so far as to “cut” or “tear” it—that is, to violate the starting condition in some fundamental way. The basic substance of the normative, English-language typewriter had to remain consistent: Hebrew could not require a full-scale reimagination of the typewriter, only a varied type of performance.

  Fortuitously for engineers, the solution to the Hebrew problem brought them halfway through the Arabic problem as well, Arabic being a script also written from right to left. The Arabic problem required still another adjustment of the typewriter form, however, this one to address the cursive ligatures that govern the flow of Arabic letters. Although typewriter engineers were pleased by the relative “economy” of Arabic letters, in terms of overall number, many Arabic letters are inscribed in one of four different ways, depending upon their relative positions within a word. Letters can appear at the beginning of a word (initials), betwixt letters (medials), at the close of a word (finals), or by themselves (isolated), challenging engineers to “fit” each of these graphemic variants on a device incapable of handling them all.

  In 1899, a self-identified artist from Cairo, Selim Haddad, patented one of the earliest designs for an Arabic typewriter.46 Arabic possessed only twenty-nine letters, he explained in the patent, but their different shapes and connections had “swelled the number of characters or type to the enormous number of six hundred and thirty-eight.”47 Haddad proposed an ingenious solution: for each Arabic letter, he would use only two variants, rather than four, one variant to handle all initials and medials, and the other to handle all finals and isolates. Constructing “my new letters without a connection-bar solely on their right sides,” he explained, “and constructing the middle and beginning letters with a connection-bar on their left I have derived advantages of great importance.”48 “It allows me to use one and the same shape of the letter for both beginning and middle positions and one and the same shape for both the end and isolated positions.”49 With this innovation, he explained, he would reduce the overall number of variant forms from over six hundred to a mere fifty-eight—well within the compass of the single-keyboard apparatus.50

  Inventors did not always agree on the best way to transmute the single-keyboard typewriter form to achieve such technolinguistic performances. The problem of Arabic orthographic variation was later revisited by Baron Paul Tcherkassov of St. Petersburg, Russia, and Robert Erwin Hill of Chicago.51 Calling their machine a “Universal Eastern alphabet type-writer,” oriented toward what they collectively described as scripts “such as the Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hindustani,” Tcherkassov and Hill contended that the “Arabic problem” was to be resolved using a group of specially crafted, semantically meaningless graphemes that could be combined with real Arabic letters to produce all necessary ligatures. Simply put, their Arabic typewriter would produce certain letters using conventional, single-key acts of inscription, while others would need to be “built up” using multiple keystrokes (some being real Arabic letters, and others being meaningless “connectors”).52

  No matter the disagreements, however, typewriter inventors in the twentieth century all subscribed to one powerful orthodoxy: never should the encounter with exotic scripts throw the single-keyboard typewriter form itself into question in any fundamental regard. “It is highly desirable in building a special machine of this sort,” one inventor noted, capturing this orthodoxy succinctly, “that as much of the machine as possible may be of the ordinary standard form and of such a character that the special machines can run as far as possible through the ordinary course of manufacture for which the factory is organized and for which the tools are adapted.”53 Such motivations are readily understandable when we return to the discussion above regarding the factory as the site of language. Companies like Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, Olympia, and others had built factory floors fine-tuned to the stamping and assembly of metal parts, compositing them into precision devices to be shipped all over the world as part of a lucrative market. While a powerful economic motivation was to produce as many different types of foreign-language machines as possible, nevertheless the mantra of the period was, quite reasonably, that of minimal modification.54

  By the midpoint of the century, the single-shift keyboard had conquered practically the entire world, with traces of its own historical particularity all but erased. Encounters with Siamese, Hebrew, and Arabic may have challenged the typewriter form, demanding it to stretch beyond its English-language and even Latin alphabetic origins, and prompting engineers to reopen such “black boxes” as leftward carriage advance, dead keys, and more, and yet never did such modulations threaten the machine’s core mechanical principles. The fundamental blueprints of the starting point remained identical in every instance, as did the machine’s underlying processes of casting and assembly. The single-keyboard machine had not only conquered the global typewriter market. It would seem to have conquered script itself.

  The globalization of the single-shift keyboard typewriter had profound effects on the writing systems it absorbed into its expanding family. The most profound impact was reserved, however, for the one world script that it failed to absorb: Chinese.

  Tap-Key and the Chinese Monster

  Chinese characters eluded Remington, conspicuously and frustratingly absent from the company’s growing roster. Although thousands of Western-style keyboard machines
were indeed sold on the Chinese market, this was exclusively in support of the expatriate and Western colonial offices in China’s treaty ports and missionary outposts. Although typewriter companies made widespread claims about the universality of their machines—that their machines could handle all languages—such claims quietly excluded a vast subset of the human population. The typewriter’s “universality” was anything but.

  When we reflect on the approach of engineers and inventors, the reasons for this absence are not difficult to surmise. If Hebrew had challenged engineers to make their machines bidirectional, vertical Chinese writing challenged them to imagine a machine that moved along a different axis altogether. If keyboard designers strained in their statistical analyses of Siamese, Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew, Chinese confronted them with an entirely nonalphabetic script. Albeit unintentionally, Chinese writing served as vigilant witness to the pseudo-universalism of the typewriter form, this false pretender to transcendence. That Chinese played this role, it bears reminding, was by no means preordained. Had no solution presented itself for the “Arabic typewriter problem” or the “Siamese typewriter problem,” one or more of these scripts might have stood beyond the outer bounds of the typewriter’s plastic embrace. One or more of these scripts might themselves have achieved the status, not simply of “an other,” but as “the Other”: alterity so radical that the Western typewriter form could not become it, except through a metamorphosis so intense as to annihilate this typewriter-self in the process. A solution was found for each of these puzzles, however, sometimes elegantly and at other times awkwardly: Hebrew became English “backward,” Arabic became English “in cursive,” Russian became English “with different letters,” Siamese became English “with too many letters,” French became English “with accents,” and so forth. While different in many ways, Arabic, Hebrew, and Siamese were, in some fundamental sense, commensurable with the typewriter—and therefore, commensurable with the technolinguistic modernity it represented.

  For predictable financial reasons, typewriter developers and manufacturers never entertained the notion of abandoning their pseudo-universal typewriter form in the face of a recalcitrant Chinese script. What ensued was precisely the opposite. They dispensed with all of the romantic notions of civilizational possibility that characterized their engagements with other languages. They abandoned their seemingly boundless willingness to interrogate and reimagine many of the typewriter form’s most taken-for-granted features. Instead, they marshaled all of the material and symbolic resources at their disposal to set out on what would become an unrelenting, multifront character assassination of the Chinese script itself—a kind of technolinguistic Chinese exclusion act. From this moment forward, it would be the Chinese script, and not any limitations of the single-keyboard typewriter form, that would bear the full weight of responsibility for the “impossibility” of Chinese typewriting—if Chinese was technolinguistically “poor,” the script alone was responsible for its poverty. Phrased differently, the single-keyboard typewriter form would finally realize its universality by excommunicating from this universe one of the world’s oldest and most widely used writing systems. In the Kristevan sense, the Chinese script was marked as the “abject form”: an object or condition existentially intolerable to a given system or state of affairs, and as such one that had to be banished from ontology itself.

  Here, then, we return to Tap-Key and the comical monstrosity of the imagined Chinese typewriter to explore the second question raised at the outset of this chapter: What ideological work is being performed by images and ideas such as these? What does it mean that the Chinese typewriter has been derided and denigrated by the strange bedfellows of MC Hammer, Walter Ong, Bill Bryson, The Simpsons, Qian Xuantong, Anthony Burgess, Tom Selleck, the Far Eastern Republic, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Daily Tribune, Louis John Stellman, and countless others?

  To answer this question, we must momentarily return to a time before the typewriter, when critiques of Chinese writing were not grounded in terms of technology so much as those of race, cognition, and evolution. In The Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel posited that the very nature of Chinese writing “is at the outset a great hindrance to the development of the sciences.”55 Arguing that the very structure of Chinese grammar rendered certain habits and dispositions of modern thought unavailable—ineffable and perhaps even unimaginable—he found that those who thought and spoke in Chinese were inhibited by the very language they used from ever taking the stage of progressive History with a capital H. All human societies were by language possessed, in other words, yet Chinese people had the misfortune of being possessed by one that was incompatible with modern thought.

  Within the larger history of the anti-Chinese discourse, Hegel’s role was one of transmitter and popularizer but not innovator. As many scholars have argued, the nineteenth century witnessed the formation of a powerful strain of social Darwinist thought which, like its parent theory, organized the totality of human language into a hierarchy of progress and backwardness.56 The organizing principle, again reflecting its epistemic heritage, valorized the Indo-European language family, and deemed as developmentally retarded those languages that lacked such properties as declension, conjugation, and, above all, alphabetic script. As linguist, missionary, and sinologist Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884) observed, “Chinese, Mexican, and Egyptian were alike morphographic; sometimes called ideographic.” Among these, “Mexican” was barbarously destroyed by Western invaders, and Egyptian ultimately yielded to phoneticization. China alone tenaciously held on to this dying system of writing, “upheld by its literature; strengthened by its isolation; and honored by its people and their neighbors who had no written language.”57 What ensued was a “mental isolation caused by the language”: “it has attached them to their literature, developed their conceit, given them self reliance, induced contempt of other nations, hindered their progress.”58 Such languages were understood as being stuck in a state of arrested development that, in turn, froze in time those who spoke and thought in, with, and through these languages.

  Chinese was long a preferred target of social Darwinism. Comparativists dwelled on its “ideographic” script, tones, and lack of conjugation, declension, gender, and plurality. Chinese was, for many, the quintessential antipode, a conviction so powerful that even apologies for the Chinese language could be drafted into the service of its critique. In 1838, Peter S. Du Ponceau (1760–1844) mounted a painstaking argument in which he refuted the long-held idea of Chinese as an ideographic language, demonstrating that the majority of characters were in fact composed of both categorical and phonetic components.59 Faced with this seemingly destabilizing proposition, one that might have closed the space of alterity between Chinese and non-Chinese languages, reviewers of Du Ponceau’s work seized upon this idea of semi-phoneticization to recast the language as an evolutionary half-breed—a written language on its way to, but which never arrived at, full alphabetization. Du Ponceau, one review read, “has successfully combated the old and general opinion, that the Chinese system of writing is ideographic; showing that the characters do not represent ideas but words, which recall ideas.”60 At the same time, the reviewer continued, Du Ponceau had also demonstrated that the Chinese were linguistically inferior to even “the savage tribes of the New World.” The latter, “though destitute of all literature and even of written language,” the review continued, “are found to be in possession of highly complex and artificial forms of speech … while in the Old World, the ingenious Chinese, who were civilized and had a national literature even before the glorious days of Greece and Rome, have for four thousand years had an extremely simple, not to say rude and inartificial language, that, according to the common theories, seems to be the infancy of human speech.”61 The lowest of the New World, it would seem, surpassed the highest of the Old.

  Fetishization of the alphabet operated as a powerful trope within many disciplines, tending to show
up wherever Western scholars engaged in the comparison of linguistic scripts and ruminated on the relative strengths and weaknesses thereof. In 1853, Henry Noel Humphrey wrote in his The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing that the Chinese “never carried the art of writing to its legitimate development in the creation of a perfect phonetic alphabet.”62 “The Chinese language,” a 1912 tract reported, “is the most horrible that any sane man can be called upon to acquire.”63 “The Chinese language must go.”64 “Phonetic characters in-the-making, like the Chinese,” W.A. Mason echoed in his 1920 tract The History of the Art of Writing, “long since arrested in the development of its written characters at an early stage.”65 “Away with the old ideography,” Bernhard Karlgren proclaimed cavalierly in his classic 1926 study Philology and Ancient China, “and replace it with phonetic writing.”66 A 1932 report phrased it even more bluntly: “The writing of Chinese in the Chinese manner is, as a proposition, simply ‘too bad.’”67

  Over the course of the twentieth century, however, voices both inside and outside the social sciences began to question the social Darwinist program, and with it, notions of Chinese as evolutionarily “unfit.” In 1936, American sinologist Herrlee Glessner Creel (1905–1994) published “On the Nature of Chinese Ideography,” an essay in which he mounted a painstaking critique of the widely shared belief that Chinese script constituted an orthographic half-breed caught between the presumed origins of all written language—pictography—and their presumed destiny of full phoneticization. Creel mounted a critique not only of anti-Chinese discourse but also of the West’s broader preoccupation with cenemic script. “We Occidentals have come, by long habitude,” he argued, “to think that any method of writing which consists merely of graphic representations of thought, but which is not primarily a system for the graphic notation of sounds, in some way falls short of what writing was foreordained to be, is not indeed writing in the full sense of the word.”68 Creel took aim directly at authors who believed in the supremacy of the alphabet, and the related idea that the grammar of Chinese rendered certain forms of thought—particularly those forms deemed critical to modernity—ineffable.