The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  Creel’s argument hinged upon a pivotal critique being leveled at the time against broader notions of comparative civilization and race science—a critique exemplified in the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942). While the impact of Boas’s work could be felt in other disciplines, Creel explained, it was to be lamented that no parallel shift had yet taken place in writings on nonalphabetic languages such as Chinese. “In philosophy, in the study of society, in biology, we have at last abandoned the theory of unilinear evolution,” Creel explained. He continued:

  We no longer suppose that we can range all living creatures in a single line, from the protozoan to man. We recognize that phenomena are various and intractable, not fitting easily into our preconceived schemes. We have learned that theories must be cut to fit the facts, not facts to fit the theories. But in this matter of writing the old idea lingers on. If Chinese does not fit into the predetermined top of the scale, then it follows that Chinese is primitive.69

  Culminating Creel’s argument was a profound and deceptively simple pronouncement: “It is as natural for the Chinese to write ideographically as it is for us to write phonetically.”70

  Over time, evolutionist arguments against Chinese have fallen steadily into dubious standing. In his 1985 work Writing Systems, Geoffrey Sampson dedicated an extended meditation to refuting the notion of Chinese insufficiency.71 Meanwhile, those who had once lent authority to such arguments began to backpedal. Referring to his and others’ work in the influential volume Literacy in Traditional Societies, Jack Goody later stated that “We certainly gave greater weight than we should to the ‘uniqueness of the West’ in terms of communication, a failing in which we were not alone.”72 Goody began to tread more cautiously around the question of Chinese, and retreated from earlier claims of Western exceptionalism. “The logographic script inhibited the development of a democratic literate culture,” Goody added, in line with his earlier claims, but “it did not prevent the use of writing for achieving remarkable ends in the spheres of science, learning and literature.”73 Goody steadily distanced himself from one-time fellow travelers, and from overreaching and Eurocentric scholarship that confidently presented the alphabet as the catalytic agent of the “Greek Miracle.”74 Although Eric Havelock saw fit to posit that “the Chinese script is a historical irrelevance,” and although Robert Logan blamed Chinese script for the absence of a Chinese scientific revolution, Goody now went so far as to hint at the possibility of Chinese advantages and Western disadvantages.75 “With a vastly reduced number of components,” Goody wrote in 2000, “it becomes initially more difficult, but in the end easier to learn. Logographs, such as Chinese characters, can be learned one by one. Everyone, even without schooling and language learning, can be partially literate. In Japan, I have only to recognize the sign, not the word, for entrance or men, to be able to use the parking lot or the toilet; I do not have to understand a whole system, as with the alphabet.”76 “Of these there are some 8,000 in current use, although basic Chinese for popular literature needs a range of only 1000–1500 characters,” Goody continued. “In these respects it is the most conservative of contemporary writing systems.”77

  Concepts of alphabetic supremacy and Chinese linguistic unfitness were not so easily dispelled, and yet those who continue to champion such views have found themselves increasingly marginalized. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, linguist and psychologist Alfred Bloom briefly took up the torch of the Chinese-as-nonmodern camp. The lack of a subjunctive mood in the Chinese language, he argued in the course of a 1979 article, rendered it impossible for Chinese thinkers to conceive counterfactually, thereby limiting their capacity to conceive of or generate the sort of hypothetical propositions that were so vital to the development of science and innovation.78 This same view also informed the work of sinologist Derk Bodde who, in describing a China he saw as “linguistically handicapped,” argued that “written Chinese has, in a variety of ways, hindered more than it has helped the development of scientific ways of thinking in China.”79 Inheriting and elaborating upon the long heritage of Chinese antimodernity, William Hannas has more recently attempted to resurrect many of the same arguments, contending that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean orthography “curbs creativity” and helps explain Asia’s inability to compete in the world of technology and innovation.80

  As William Boltz calmly noted, however, in reference to the work of Bloom, and by extension all those who mount arguments couched in ideas of cognitive limitation: “No serious linguist who knows Chinese has had any difficulty refuting it.” Consonant with Creel’s “principle of effability,” Boltz underscored a claim that was fast becoming accepted fact—that “languages in their capacity to express human thought are all equal, at least in the sense that every language has the capacity or potential to express what its speakers want to express.”81

  With the decline of race science and the rise of cultural relativism, the story of the twentieth century would seem to be one of steadily growing cross-cultural engagement and understanding. Notions of Chinese linguistic “unfitness” have largely disappeared, or at the very least have become decidedly quieter and less self-certain. Those who carry the torch of previous generations have come to seem archaically Eurocentric and gauche—if not the dross of airport bookshop paperbacks, unworthy of serious intellectual engagement.

  In reality, however, the concept of Chinese linguistic unfitness not only survived the decline of evolutionism and race science, but flourished in the new century. This rejuvenation and fortification owed its second life to technology, wherein questions of Chinese linguistic fitness henceforth moved out of the politically untenable realm of race, and into the sanitized realm of technological devices like the typewriter. Principal among the denigrators were technologists themselves. “From Ancient to Olivetti,” the Lettera 22 campaign of the early 1950s read, this slogan displayed prominently above a pair of contrasting images: the Olivetti typewriter, which stood as the emblem of sleek and functional modernity, and a potpourri of Chinese characters of the kind found on oracle bones from the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE)—used as the token placeholders for antiquity (figure 1.11).

  1.11 Advertisement for Olivetti Lettera 22

  By the second half of the twentieth century, there existed a global echo chamber in which tropes of Chinese technolinguistic absurdity and irrelevance resonated and repeated, unchecked and uncritically. In 1958 Olivetti proclaimed that their machines “write in all languages” (figure 1.12).82 Like Remington and Underwood, Olivetti could enjoy such a statement only to the extent that the company barred from view the script that stood frustratingly outside its embrace: Chinese.

  1.12 Olivetti article from 1958

  Meanwhile, the rest of the world’s love affair with the keyboard typewriter grew ever more passionate. The typewriter was an inscription machine, first and foremost, but far beyond that, it had become a thick symbolic ecology made up of imagery, aesthetics, iconography, and nostalgia. In service to the cult of authorship, the typewriter became a legitimating mark of the artist. Any writer of repute (real or imagined) had to be photographed at some point before his or her favorite model, immortalized in the smoky act of creation. By mid-century, the cult of the typewriter was so strong that Allen Ginsberg, in the famous closing passage of Howl, could even use this inscription device to announce the sacredness of the device itself. In more ways than Ginsberg himself may have realized, the typewriter was indeed Holy!83

  Meanwhile, more than any other symbol, the “Chinese typewriter” as imagined object became the single most widespread and damning piece of evidence in the rejuvenated trial against Chinese characters—one in which Chinese script was again found to be incompatible with modernity and deserving of abolition. What at first ran parallel to, and helped to illustrate its more dominant evolutionist counterpart, soon inherited the throne as the only acceptable mode by which concepts of Chinese unfitness could be deployed. By conjuring up farcical and absurdist images of monstrous Chinese typewriters, t
he criticism of Chinese inoculated itself against claims of unsavory evolutionism, and recast itself in the sanitized and supposedly objective language of technological fitness. While it became déclassé for one to concur with Bodde, Havelock, Bloom, and others on evolutionist grounds, or with their more distant Hegelian antecedents, the ongoing trial against the modernity of the Chinese language was renewed in the twentieth century with redoubled vigor in the seemingly neutral realm of technolinguistics. Perhaps Chinese speakers were able to express themselves as completely as those of Western languages in a cognitive sense, and so Hegel was wrong. Yet technologically, speakers and writers of Chinese were demonstrably hindered by their onerous script, one that obstructed literacy and the adoption of modern information technologies such as telegraphy, typewriting, stenography, punched-card computing, and more—and so Hegel was right. This modern technological critique of Chinese—one framed in the clean, plastic-and-metal world of carriage advance and platens, rather than blood-temperature terms such as cognition, culture, race, social Darwinism, and evolutionism—would in the last will and testament of its aged and estranged forebear deftly and quietly be named the inheritor of its entire discursive fortune.

  Having now prepared ourselves to meet real Chinese typewriters—to view them with our own eyes, and listen to them with our own ears—we will need to remain conscious of the fact that, at all times, the interpretive frameworks through which we grasp and understand such sights and sounds will never stop being shaped by and refracted through the imaginary Chinese machine we have just come to know. Our eyes and ears are not our own private possessions, that is to say, but products of the very history examined in this chapter. Rather than disdain Tap-Key or feign liberation from him and his descendants—efforts that would not only be disingenuous but also unproductive—our posture should instead be one of uncomfortable embrace. The typewriter form globalized by Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, Olympia, and others is not an object with which we have a “relationship,” in the sense that it sits at a distance from us, separated by Cartesian emptiness. The typewriter form that emerged during the twentieth century, and which spilled out into a broader iconography, is an object we think with and through, not an object we think about. By accident of history, our consciousness at this particular moment in time is Remington.

  We travel now to Ningbo, in southeast China, but to a time prior to the emergence of the typewriter. As we will see, the “puzzle” of Chinese typewriting—that is, of fitting a nonalphabetic script containing thousands of characters within a novel information technology—is one that first emerged in the 1800s among foreigners who contemplated the relationship between the Chinese language and two earlier technolinguistic systems: movable type and telegraphy. It was here in the 1800s, before the advent of the typewriter, that the puzzle of Chinese typewriting first began to take shape.

  Notes

  1 “A Chinese Typewriter,” San Francisco Examiner (January 22, 1900).

  2 Ibid. The final string of exclamations is meant to parody the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9 as spoken in Cantonese.

  3 St. Louis Globe-Democrat (January 11, 1901), 2–3.

  4 Louis John Stellman, Said the Observer (San Francisco: Whitaker & Ray Co., 1903).

  5 The Chinese Typewriter, written by Stephen J. Cannell, directed by Lou Antonio, starring Tom Selleck and James Whitmore, Jr., 78 mins., 1979, Universal City Studios.

  6 Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue: The English Language (New York: Penguin, 1999), 110.

  7 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2013 [1982]), 86.

  8 Specimens of these machines can be found at the Mitterhofer Schreibmaschinenmuseum in Partschins (Parcines), Italy, along with a number of other public and private collections.

  9 Edwin Hunter McFarland (1864–1895); George Bradley McFarland (1866–1942).

  10 Samuel Gamble McFarland (1830–1897); Jane Hays McFarland (?–1908). Samuel Gamble and his wife traveled to Bangkok from New York via Singapore and the Cape of Good Hope, and there they joined the small Presbyterian mission in Bangkok. The family soon moved to Petchaburi under the patronage of the local governor, where the McFarlands would spend the next seventeen years, shuttling back and forth between there and Bangkok via a three-day, two-night rowboat journey. George B. McFarland, Reminiscences of Twelve Decades of Service to Siam, 1860–1936, Bancroft Library, BANCMSS 2007/104, box 4, folder 14, George Bradley McFarland, 1866–1942, 2.

  11 The McFarland children—William, Edwin (also known as Samuel), George, and Mary—were all born in Siam, having one of their first opportunities to visit the United States in 1873. When they returned home to Siam in August 1875, William and Edwin stayed behind to attend school.

  12 Tej Bunnag, The Provincial Administration of Siam, 1892–1915: The Ministry of the Interior under Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  13 McFarland, Reminiscences, 5. Having reached its third edition, the reference work had fallen out of print for at least five years when his father’s passing inspired the creation of a fourth. He would continue to release further editions in 1916, 1930, and 1932. For these and other activities, George McFarland was the recipient of multiple honors. Under King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910—Rama V), he was bequeathed the 4th Order of the White Elephant—and by King Vajiravudh (r. 1910–1925—Rama VI) the 3rd Order of the Crown of Siam and title of First Councilor, Phra Ach Vidyagama. He was also named emeritus professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Chulalongkorn University. McFarland, Reminiscences, 13.

  14 G. Tilghman Richards, The History and Development of Typewriters: Handbook of the Collection Illustrating Typewriters (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1938), 13.

  15 “The Hall Typewriter,” Scientific American (July 10, 1886), 24.

  16 See english.stackexchange.com/questions/43563/what-percentage-of-characters-in-normal-english-literature-is-written-in-capital (accessed October 26, 2015).

  17 Richards, The History and Development of Typewriters, 41.

  18 “Accuracy: The First Requirement of a Typewriter,” Dun’s Review 5 (1905): 119; “The Shrewd Buyer Investigates,” New Metropolitan 21, no. 5 (1905): 662.

  19 “A Siamese Typewriter,” School Journal (July 3, 1897), 12.

  20 McFarland, Reminiscences, 9.

  21 He would later reign as King Rama VI until his death in 1925. See Walter Francis Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1978); Stephen Lyon Wakeman Greene, Absolute Dreams: Thai Government Under Rama VI, 1910–1925 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999).

  22 King Rama V presented to George McFarland the 4th Order of the White Elephant, an accolade to be followed by the 3rd Order of the Crown of Siam and the title of first councilor, Phra Ach Vidyagama, both conferred upon him by King Rama VI. In 1902, George was ordained elder of the Second Church of Bangkok, and later served as president of the Conference of Christian Workers until 1914.

  23 For the denizens of Syracuse, this relationship inspired curiosity. In July 1897, The School Journal expressed excitement over the impending visit of the king and queen of Siam to the United States. “Some time ago,” the article proudly recounted, “the Prince of Siam was sent to this country to have made a number of typewriters fitted with Siamese letters.” “The Smith Premier Typewriter Company was selected to build the machines, the work being superintended by the secretary.” “A Siamese Typewriter,” 12. Smith Premier would later host the new crown prince of Siam, the young man who would later accede to the throne to become King Rama VI. Phonetic Journal (May 15, 1897), 306–307; “Highlights of Syracuse Decade by Decade,” Syracuse Journal (March 20, 1939), E2; “Siam’s Future King Guest in Syracuse,” Syracuse Post-Standard (November 4, 1902), 5.

  24 McFarland, Reminiscences, 12.

  25 Ibid., 13–14.

  26 Ibid., 13.

  27 Ibid. There was an undoubtedly personal dimension t
o George’s lament at play, his late brother having deliberately chosen the double-keyboard over its shift keyboard counterpart. As George made a point of emphasizing in his memoir, the deceased Edwin had “chosen the Smith Premier as best adapted to his purpose because of its large number of keys.” McFarland, Reminiscences, 9.

  28 Ibid., 13.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Underwood was the pioneer of visible, front-strike typewriting, the Underwood Number 1 (1897). Front-strike, visible typewriting was developed by Franz X. Wagner, originally of the Yost Caligraph company. John T. Underwood took up his design, and in the process established a company that offered serious competition to the giant Remington. Richards, The History and Development of Typewriters, 43; A.J.C. Cousin, “Typewriting Machine,” United States Patent no. 1794152 (filed July 13, 1928; patented February 24, 1931).

  31 George had left the world of typewriting behind by this point, concentrating his efforts on other parts of the family’s legacy. He went on to rebuild the Phetchaburi Church first constructed by his father, and at the same time oversaw the republication and expansion of his father’s Siamese-language dictionary. McFarland, Reminiscences, 14.

  32 Photographs, October 23, 1938, George Bradley McFarland Papers, box 3, folder 15, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  33 In 1886, the firm purchased the Remington interests, with the manufacturing division being reconstituted in 1903 as the Remington Typewriter Company (and subsequently as Remington Rand Inc. in 1927). Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, The Remington Standard Typewriter (Boston: Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict [Remington Typewriter Co.]), 1897, 7.