The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  Sheffield’s motives for inventing a Chinese typewriter were complex. While it is tempting to assume that he was driven by a desire to more rapidly produce and disseminate Christian and Western texts among potential Chinese converts, this desire was in fact already well served by existing print technologies at the missionary’s disposal. Indeed, Sheffield had already signed his name to many Chinese-language works by this point, beginning with his six-volume magnum opus, the Universal History in 1881. This was followed by a number of other Chinese-language publications, including Systematic Theology (1893), Important Doctrines on Theology (1894), Political Economy (1896), Principles of Ethics (1907), Psychology (1907), and Political Science (1909).18 He was also a frequent contributor of short Chinese essays to journals such as The Child’s Paper.19 As all of this suggests, Sheffield’s publishing ambitions were more than amply provided for by existing methods and technologies.20

  When it came to the more intimate act of writing letters in Chinese, however, here Sheffield felt at a loss. “Paul accomplished much in strengthening the work which he had personally established by letters to the churches,” Sheffield remarked, suggesting that both he and other missionaries might employ his new apparatus to correspond by letter with Chinese associates. “There is evidently a wide and important field for missionary activity in this direction, which is now largely neglected by reason of reluctance to master the use of the Chinese character as a means of written communication.”21 He did not conceive of his invention in terms of its potential impact on the Chinese economy, Chinese modernity, or other grand and abstract concepts. For Sheffield, his machine signified liberation from his own longstanding dependence on Chinese clerks and secretaries who composed his letters on his behalf—in a word, Sheffield’s goal was to develop a kind of Chinese robot, or amanuensis machine, that could output characters composed and cut by native Chinese hands, but at the same time obviate all need for an actual Chinese clerk. While Sheffield and many of his foreign colleagues considered themselves highly proficient if not fluent in Chinese, only with a novel apparatus like this, he believed, would it be fully possible to compose documents by his own hand that upheld the aesthetic standards befitting a man of his erudition and status.

  Aesthetics were not the only concern, moreover. “I am convinced,” Sheffield wrote, “that to the present time foreigners doing literary work in the Chinese language are under unnecessary bondage to Chinese assistants.”22 There was something decidedly prophylactic about the clerk, he felt: a culturally alien third party constantly intermediating, subtly altering, and ultimately interfering in the foreigner’s work. “They usually talk to their writer,” Sheffield commented, referring to foreigners and their Chinese assistants, “and he takes down with a pen what has been said, and later puts their work into Chinese literary style.” “The finished product will be found,” he continued, “to have lost in this process no slight proportion of what the writer wished to say, and to have taken on quite as large a proportion of what the Chinese assistant contributed to the thought.”23 As with many of his colonial and semicolonial contemporaries, then, Sheffield was motivated by a persistent anxiety, a concern that the unavoidable process of translation and amanuensis upon which foreigners relied necessarily led to the loss (and perhaps deft and malicious erasure) of one’s intended meaning, and the interpolation of the native clerk’s world views and sensibilities.24

  To drive home his point, Sheffield referenced an unnamed book on botany by a “distinguished Western scholar in Chinese, in which he informs the student that there is in Southern China a certain plant produced from a worm!” “Of course,” Sheffield continued, “such an interesting fact in natural history was contributed by the Chinese writer, and in some way survived the ordeal of proof-reading.”25 “No foreigner should be ambitious to write in Chinese for publication without the revision of a good native scholar,” he conceded, “but by early and habitual practice in independent composition, which one would be stimulated to by a type-wheel, the foreigner I am confident would become master of his own thoughts in Chinese at a much earlier date than at present, and would do his work in composition to suit his own tie without regard to the presence or absence of the Chinese writer.”26 Sheffield’s machine would allow the foreigner in China to wrest back control of meaning itself.

  The Body of Christ: The Competing Logics of Common Usage in Sheffield’s Chinese Typewriter

  In his pursuit of a typewriter for Chinese script, Sheffield’s experimental process did not unfold in a vacuum. As with Gamble, Pauthier, Legrand, Escayrac de Lauture, and others before him, his process was shaped by his own deep-seated beliefs about Chinese characters. “Each character,” he proclaimed, “must be treated as an irresolvable individual.” Sheffield expanded on this conviction: “The machine must then produce, not letters, not parts of words, but complete words at each stroke. It must be able to bring with rapidity and precision from four to six thousand characters to the printing point.”27

  Sheffield’s observations about Chinese characters represented personal convictions, not neutral, objective statements of fact. As we saw in the preceding chapter, divisible type printing regarded characters not as “irresolvable individuals” but as meta- or epiphenomenal entities built up or “spelled” by using still more fundamental, elemental units. In Chinese telegraphy, meanwhile, Chinese characters were treated as referential touchstones, to be addressed but not trafficked in directly. Had Sheffield shared the commitments and dispositions of Pauthier, Legrand, and Beyerhaus, or perhaps of Escayrac de Lauture or Viguier, he might have set off down a very different path in conceptualizing his new inscription technology. Sheffield was aware, it bears emphasizing, of other approaches to the question of Chinese information technology—including the divisible type method we examined in the preceding chapter. Indeed, Sheffield once met the typewriter magnate Thomas Hall in New York, the developer of the index typewriter we met briefly in chapter 1. “On learning that I was trying my hand on the production of a Chinese type-writer,” Sheffield later recounted, “[Hall] showed the incredulous interest of the man of experience, who has tried and failed, towards the man of inexperience, who is about to try, and of course to fail in like manner.”28 “He told me that he had already grappled with the problem of making a type-writer for the Chinese language,” Sheffield continued in his account, and “drew from a drawer a crumpled piece of paper printed upon in the Chinese character.” “He had started out with the thought that he could separate characters into their component strokes, and by having all possible strokes arranged upon a printing-face of his type-writer he could combine these strokes to produce the desired characters.”29 As Sheffield recounted, however, Hall had become discouraged once he “discovered that while the number of possible strokes was not alarmingly great, the size, proportion, and relation, of the strokes in combination were infinite in their variations.”30 Aesthetic concerns also complicated and compromised this system of printing, insofar as the resulting characters often appeared spatially loose and incoherent. “Such a system of writing Chinese characters by ticking off the strokes that unite to form them would bear less likeness to the living character than the dry bones in the vision to living men!”31

  While we cannot know precisely why Sheffield arrived at the commitments he did, we do know that his beliefs about Chinese characters shaped every step along the path of developing his typewriter. First, in committing himself to the “irresolvable individuality” of characters, the very first question that surfaced for him was, quite naturally: how was he to fit these tens of thousands of individuals on a machine? Riding through the streets of Tongzhou aboard a rickshaw, as he recounted, Sheffield was struck by a realization: to solve the problem of the script’s abundance, he would begin by frequenting local foundries and typesetting offices, speaking with Chinese printers who, through their accumulated experience of cutting, forging, and using Chinese typefaces, possessed an intimate, firsthand knowledge as to which characters were most and least frequen
tly used. Based upon these observations—observations reminiscent of Staunton’s and Gamble’s in chapter 2—Sheffield’s typewriter would include only what he termed a “careful selection of characters for general use.”32 As for the many other characters in the Chinese lexicon, they would simply be excluded.

  By 1888, Sheffield had news to share. “Have I written you about my new invention?” he rejoiced to his family members back home. “It is certain to attract considerable attention when it is known to the public. It is a Chinese type-writer, a machine with which to write Chinese.” His goal was to make the wheel of the machine from wood, but to “send it to America to have it made by a machinist in metal.” “I think it will print faster than a Chinese teacher can write,” he continued, “and in that case it will be in considerable demand, especially by foreigners in China, as but very few of them are able to write Chinese. They may be good Chinese scholars, reading the language with ease, but they have not taken the time to learn all the complicated strokes that make up the characters.”33

  The typewriter Sheffield had produced looked nothing like the Western machine he had purchased in Tianjin (figure 3.1).34 Instead, it looked like a “small round table,” as he described it, wherein Chinese characters were arranged into thirty concentric circles. Having determined that “the working vocabulary of Chinese scholars is easily within the limit of six thousand,” and furthermore that “this list can be reduced to four thousand, with but rare occasion to strike outside of the list to give expression to thought,” Sheffield ultimately settled upon a total of 4,662 characters in all.35 As for the other tens of thousands of characters in Chinese, they would be jettisoned entirely.36

  3.1 Chinese typewriter invented by Devello Sheffield; from “A Chinese Type-writer,” Scientific American (March 6, 1899), 359

  Sheffield’s machine departed from Chinese typesetting in another vitally important way. Because his machine inscribed one character at a time, and thus required only one of each, he was able to fit all of his characters within arm’s reach, creating a device that achieved William Gamble’s implicit yet unreachable ideal of sedentary efficiency. Indeed, having dispensed with any need for ambulatory movement, Sheffield was able to shift his focus entirely to the upper extremities of the body, giving rise to a new ideal altogether: the goal of minimizing even the movement of the operator’s hands. To this end, Sheffield further subcategorized his 4,662 characters into four regions, the first comprising 726 “very common characters,” the second a set of 1,386 “common characters,” the third a set of 2,550 “less common characters,” and the fourth with an additional group of 162 special “untabulated characters”—special characters that, owing to their importance to Sheffield and his missionary work, were included and sometimes duplicated within the list of “very common characters.”37 Ideally, if the boundaries of his four regions were set well, most of his time would be spent within the narrow region of “very common characters,” allowing his hands to work within ever-decreasing distances. Having made it possible to manipulate the machine from a single, stationary position, Sheffield had invented a new type of Chinese technolinguistic body, sedentary and dexterous. Sheffield had become the first “Chinese typist” in history.

  As Sheffield pushed “common usage Chinese” beyond the framework of Jin Jian’s printing office, and indeed even the work of William Gamble, the tensions latent within common usage—those of inclusion and exclusion, as examined in chapter 2—became more pronounced. Pulling in one direction was the descriptive imperative of common usage, one which dictated that such a device would need to encompass all of the characters needed to reproduce Chinese discourse as it currently existed. Characters of everyday usage, such as ta (他 “he”), si (四 “four”), and shang (上 “atop”), needed to be present on Sheffield’s machine, lest it be incapable of composing even the most basic of Chinese sentences, and also positioned in the easiest-to-reach zone so they could be reached with maximum speed. Sheffield’s concerns did not begin and end with the banality of particles, numerals, and common adjectives, however. As with Gamble and other Christian missionaries before him, another imperative pulled in the opposite direction. Sheffield was a harvester of souls, and as such he also wished to intervene and give rise to new terms in the Chinese language—to traffic with Chinese-reading interlocutors in highly uncommon concepts. Here we discover in Sheffield’s machine a proverbial Noah’s ark populated by birds, lions, apes, camels, dogs, and other assorted beasts. His vocabulary was that of the Bible, and as such his typewriter was a land of slaves (nu 奴) and hegemons (ba 霸), ghosts (gui 鬼) and sorcerers (wu 巫), deafness (long 聾) and blindness (mang 盲), funeral (sang 喪) and blessing (guan 盥), blood (xue 血) and excrement (fen 粪), father (ba 爸) and son (zi 子).38

  No two characters were more important for Sheffield than ye (耶) and su (穌), for in their union they formed Yesu (耶穌), the Chinese translation of Jesus. These two characters posed a unique challenge for Sheffield, however, being pulled in diametrically opposed directions by the logics of reproduction versus aspiration. By itself, ye was a frequently used particle in literary Chinese, and so could claim its rightful place within the list of 726 “very common characters.” Su, by contrast, was far less common, typically appearing only as a variant of the more standard form su (蘇), as in the place name Suzhou.39 In the tension between the descriptive and prescriptive imperatives, then, the literary Christ-body of Yesu was being pulled apart. If Sheffield obeyed the imperative of mere description, su would either have to be placed in a separate region from ye, or perhaps excluded from the machine altogether—since, after all, his character set already represented but a fraction of the total Chinese lexicon. To obey the second imperative would involve “promoting” su far above what lexical evidence recommended. The first imperative would quite literally divide Christ, locating his two halves in separate domains, and thus embedding within the very structure of the machine a need to perpetually exert energy to reconstitute him. The second imperative would place the unity of the linguistic Christ-body above the concerns of the mundane world.

  In the end, Sheffield was decisively indecisive. He included two copies of su on his machine, placing one where it belonged empirically—within the list of 2,550 “less common characters”—and the other where it belonged theologically—within the exclusive list of “very common characters.” The Christ-body was thus simultaneously intact and divided on Sheffield’s machine, forming a taut, straining distance that in many ways captured the objective of Sheffield’s missionary work overall: to begin in a time when Yesu was an uncommon word in Chinese and then to use epistolary technologies such as the typewriter to help bring about its commonality and ubiquity. Sheffield wanted to close the gap between the two su characters on his machine, so to speak, with the ascent of su into the realm of high-frequency characters itself being the barometer of Christ’s ascendance in China.

  Reports of Sheffield’s machine circulated in the American media in 1897, reaching readers in the states of Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, and Wisconsin, among other locales.40 “A Chinese typewriter has been invented by Rev. Mr. Sheffield,” the Daily Picayune-New Orleans reported. “It is said to be a very remarkable machine, and is exciting a great deal of comment over there.”41 The machine, it was reported, “is said to exceed so far the speed of the swiftest Chinese writer that its value is assured.”42 “It turns out to be a great success,” the Semi-Weekly Tribute reported, “and will relieve both the foreigners and the native Chinese from the necessity of using a paint brush and a pot of ink in conducting their correspondence.”43

  Perhaps inspired by these reports, a curious change of heart took place in Sheffield wherein he clearly began to think of his machine as one perhaps capable of “liberating” Chinese clerks as well—in this case, liberating them from the requirements of manuscript. “Few as yet see in it anything more than a cunning play-thing,” he lamented, however, presumably speaking of Chine
se clerks to whom he had demonstrated the apparatus without success. “They do not comprehend how it is that foreigners seem ever to be planning how to save time. Many find time hanging heavily on their hands, and scholars will leisurely copy books containing hundreds of thousands of characters rather than purchase the book. But the world moves, and fortunately for China she is fastened to the world!”44

  Ultimately, Devello Sheffield never saw his beloved invention become anything more than a curiosity-inducing prototype. He died on July 1, 1913, shortly before his seventy-second birthday, with the whereabouts of his machine remaining a mystery to the present day.45 Perhaps Sheffield’s machine was digested long ago by a colony of white ants, that archenemy of missionary printers and their wooden apparatuses. A more romantic idea is to imagine that it resides unrecognized somewhere in Detroit, Michigan, where a sixty-seven-year-old Sheffield and his wife briefly furloughed in the spring of 1909.46 A San Francisco Chronicle article from the time gives us some cause to hold on to such an idea, mentioning that Sheffield “brings with him a Chinese typewriter of recent invention,” and providing a rather detailed description: “The instrument contains 4,000 characters on a large, circular board, within twenty-four circles. The machinery is intricate and is about as large as four machines with the American characters. It is the clergyman’s intention to have a large number of the machines manufactured in this country to be shipped back to China.”47 To have carried this to the United States at the age of sixty-seven would have been challenging enough—to bring it back upon his return, even more so. Whether the machine slumbers in a Michigan attic somewhere or has long since been composted back into Chinese soil, it was never transformed into a product of mass manufacture.