The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  By contrast, the male Chinese typist was discursively invisible, with typewriter companies in China perpetuating the idea that the sine qua non of a modern office was a young female typist—echoing the Western world even though Chinese realities were more complex.47 To be sure, parties in China could in theory have invented a stereotype of a male typist, were they sufficiently committed to fabricating new tropes that better captured the on-the-ground realities of the Chinese typing school and typing pool, and yet the periodical and archival records suggest strongly that no such discursive enterprise took place.

  Chinese Typewriting as Embodied Memory

  When young Chinese women and men entered a typing school and encountered a Chinese typewriter for the first time, one question would have quickly surfaced: How were they to memorize the locations of the more than 2,000 characters arrayed in front of them on the tray bed? What kinds of memory practices were young students to employ, and what kinds of typing pedagogies were available to familiarize them with this new technology? While the relationship between technolinguistic forms and embodied practices has received considerable attention in the West, remarkably less is known about the modern Chinese context. As Roger Chartier has demonstrated, the advent of new linguistic technologies and material forms in Europe enabled and constrained the body in unprecedented ways. The codex, as a form, permitted modes of pagination impossible with the scroll, which in turn rendered possible the creation of indexes, concordances, and other referential paratechnologies. Within this new technosomatic ensemble, the reader was now able “to traverse an entire book by paging through.”48 Unlike the scroll and its accompanying requirement of two-handed reading, moreover, the codex “no longer required participation of so much of the body,” liberating one of the reader’s hands to, among other things, take notes.

  Far less is known about the somatic dimensions of modern Chinese linguistic technology—and, in the case of Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, stenography, braille, and typesetting, hardly anything at all.49 In the case of the Chinese typewriter, a new type of body came into being: a novel coalescence of physical postures, dexterities, forms of coordination and visualization, and types of corporeal and psychological stress, all of which diverged from more familiar contexts of clerical work in the West and offer us a vibrant counterpart with which to think more expansively about forms of physical and mental discipline. Republican-era typing schools offer us a window into this history, particularly in those schools where students had the opportunity to study both Chinese and English typing. When comparing the two curricula, we find that Chinese typewriting encompassed its own distinct physical regimen, in terms of the demands it placed on memory, vision, hands, and wrists.50

  Students of Latin-alphabet typing in the Chinese schools were required to take courses in “practicing fingerwork” (lianxi fenzhi) and “blind typing” (bimu moxi) still familiar to Western students even today. By comparison, students of Chinese typewriting took an utterly different battery of classes which included “character retrieval methods” (jiancha zi fa) and “adding missing characters” (jiatian quezi), among others. While certain properties of alphabetic scripts—in particular, the limited number of modules—factored heavily in the development of “blind” typing as an ideal, there was no such commitment to blind performance in Chinese typewriting. If the QWERTY operator was trained to type without looking at the keyboard, the Chinese typist was encouraged to rely heavily on his or her faculties of vision, both direct and peripheral, and to push them to ever higher and subtler states of refinement.

  Chinese typewriters and English typewriters differed as well in terms of the somatic regimens that their operators followed in order to achieve proficiency. From a very early stage, the alphabetic typewriter had been brought into conceptual and practical relationship with the piano and piano playing, not only in terms of the keys that bedecked both instruments, but also in the formulation of training modules that resembled musical études (hence the frequent proposition in the West that women with backgrounds in piano playing made ideal candidates for clerical careers). Ideas and practices of posture were likewise borrowed frequently from the realm of piano playing, as were notions of the relative strength and dexterity of individual fingers. Both pianist and typist were meant to maintain a posture of composure and lithe fixity in their torsos and necks, with wrists neither slumping downward nor protruding upward; and both were supposed to concentrate their attention upon the orchestrated movements of the outermost extremities of their fingers. Central to Western typewriting was a hierarchy of strength, dexterity, and utility between the index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers.

  The training of Chinese typewriting was, by contrast, oriented toward helping the student bring the tray bed of his or her machine “into play”—to warm up the cold gray surface of the character matrix by walking around in it and learning its cartography—not entirely unlike the training of Chinese typesetters. To this end, typing lessons were centered around a distinct set of repetitive drills, beginning with common Chinese terms and names. These drills helped familiarize one with the absolute locations of individual characters on the tray bed, but more subtly they imprinted in memory the spatial relations between those characters that tended to go together. In the very first lesson of a typing manual from the 1930s, for example, students drilled by repeatedly typing the common two-character words “student” (xuesheng), “because” (yinwei), and two dozen others. By practicing with such words, the lexical geometries of Chinese became imprinted within the muscle memories of the student. One might not recall precisely where xue and sheng or yin and wei were in the absolute sense of x-y coordinates, but over time one would recall the general sensation of these altogether common two-character compounds.51

  Rather than simply seeking out a character on the tray bed, moving toward it, performing the type act, and then repeating this same process for the subsequent character, the trained Chinese typist was urged to refine a sensitivity to, one might say, the instantly immediate future—that is, the very next character. Upon setting out toward the first desired character, the typist was to have already begun the process of transferring a portion of her concentration to the next, performing each type act such that, at any given moment or state, she embodied a psycho-corporeal anticipation of the next.52 Typists were also trained to become sensitized to the materiality of signifiers.53 Each time the typist depressed the selection lever, the force of each type act had to be finely attuned to the weight of each character, a measurement that corresponded directly to the character’s stroke count. Should one type the single-stroke (and thus lighter) character yi (一 “one”) with the same force as the sixteen-stroke (and thus heavier) character long (龍 “dragon”), one would quite likely puncture the typing or carbon paper and have to begin the document anew. To type long with the same force as yi, however, would result in a faint, illegible registration (also making it ill-suited for carbon-paper copying). Trained operators necessarily varied the force with which they typed different characters so as to maintain a chromatic consistency across the text, and to avoid puncturing the paper.54 With this technology, then, the longstanding Chinese concept of “stroke count” was translated into the physical and corporeal logics of mass, weight, and inertia.55

  4.5 Chinese typewriter training regimen (sample), showing typist’s movement from character to character within typewriter tray bed

  Waiting for Cadmus: The Rise and Fall of “Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” Typewriters

  In light of the strides made by Commercial Press in the launch of their new typewriter division, anyone paying attention to developments in China would have witnessed the unmistakable signs of a vibrant new industry, complete with an emerging network of training institutes. By the 1920s and 1930s, indeed, there existed across China a disciplinary practice in which typists used the machine, and further brought their own bodies into accordance with it. It would not have been surprising, then, to have encountered the 1920s report in the Remington Export Re
view that proclaimed, “After a great many years of futile experimentation, a typewriter for the Chinese language has at last been perfected.” The Western world, it would seem, was finally taking notice.

  Remington Export Review was not referring to Commercial Press, however, nor to Shu Zhendong’s machine. The company newsletter was referring to Remington itself. “Robert McK. Jones, head of the typographical department of the Remington Typewriter Company and a Remington man for thirty-seven years,” it continued, “is responsible for its production.”56 A photograph of a white-bearded Jones accompanied the piece, beneath it the caption “Who Developed the Remington Chinese Typewriter.” The title of the piece said it all: “At Last—A Chinese Typewriter—A Remington.”

  Robert McKean Jones was Remington’s principal developer of foreign-language keyboards and director of the development department.57 Born in 1855 in the Wirral in northwest England, near the border of Wales, he operated a workshop in New York where he designed an estimated 2,800 keyboards for a diverse collection of scripts. Jones was one of the foremost technicians behind the globalization of the Remington typewriter examined in chapter 1. He personally adapted the single-shift keyboard machine to a reported eighty-four different languages, a feat that earned him the honorific of “master typographer.” With his command of sixteen alphabets, a trade journal reported in 1929, “there is hardly a language spoken of which he has not at least a working knowledge.”58

  Having completed an Urdu keyboard in 1918, and then keyboards for both Turkish and Arabic in 1920, Jones was an obvious choice to lead the company’s new Chinese initiative.59 In the winter of 1921, Remington set out to create a “Chu Yin Tzu-mu Keyboard,” also known as the “Phonetic Chinese” keyboard, assigning this project to Jones.60 The Chinese typewriter of Jones’s invention was unlike anything we have encountered thus far, however, for one remarkable reason: it contained almost no Chinese characters. With the exception of Chinese numerals, the remainder of his keyboard was dedicated exclusively to symbols from the recently developed Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. Jones offered brief details regarding the language reform efforts then afoot in China upon which his invention was premised. “The Chinese Government has officially adopted and is promulgating a new phonetic alphabet known as the ‘Chu Yin Tzu-mu,’ or in English, national phonetic alphabet. A formal edict commanding its use by Government officials and requiring the teaching of the system in schools has been published.”61 Jones explained that the new alphabet was “devised by a council of learned men from all sections of the country” and that its objective was to “simplify the ancient complicated system of ideographic characters and promote literacy among the people generally.”62 Jones and his patrons at the Remington typewriter company submitted their own application for a National Phonetic Chinese typewriter on March 12, 1924, even before the government of the Republic of China issued its formal promulgation of zhuyin fuhao (figure 4.6).

  4.6 Robert McKean Jones/Remington Chinese typewriter (1924/1927)

  The cognitive dissonance of this machine—a “Chinese typewriter” with no Chinese characters—was not lost on those journalists who first wrote about the invention. “A Chinese typewriter?” began Paul T. Gilbert in his piece for Nation’s Business. “Well, I suppose you might call it that; but don’t look for any of Wang Hsi-cheh’s 5000 symbols on the keyboard,” referring to Jin dynasty calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303–361). Gilbert concluded by assuring his readers, however: “It would have been impossible to devise a keyboard which would lend itself to the typing of the Chinese language.”63

  Robert McKean Jones was not the first typewriter inventor to seize upon the dream of a “Chinese alphabet” or “phonetic Chinese” as an entry point into the vast and still untapped Chinese-language market—and neither was Remington. One decade earlier, in the winter of 1913, two UK-based engineers had submitted their own joint patent application geared toward “adapting the Chinese language to the production of printed or typewritten matter.”64 John Cameron Grant and Lucien Alphonse Legros explained in the course of their patent application that their machine would not feature Chinese characters per se, but rather a phonetic Chinese “alphabet” that was currently in circulation in China. “Within the last few years,” Grant and Legros explained, “a new Chinese alphabet, or more strictly speaking, syllabary, has come into certain vogue and semi-official use.” This development would come as a relief both to China and to the wider world, the inventors explained, insofar as a character-based typewriter was itself an impossibility. Regarding China’s character-based script, “its adaption for modern machine composition is entirely out of the question, as it would be quite beyond the range of practical possibility to cut and apply such a number of matrices to any known form of machine composition, or indeed, to bring the whole language easily into the compass of any known power of manual composition at case.” Meanwhile, however, any attempt by foreigners to develop “Romanized” versions of Chinese was equally bound to fail. Foreign Romanization schemes “have grave disadvantages, firstly, from the fact that the alphabet itself is foreign, and therefore objectionable,” and secondly that they require the usage of additional symbols to convey Chinese tones.65

  But the script that would form the basis of their typewriter was something apart—it had been invented in China and by Chinese. In the wake of the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the newly established Ministry of Education of the Republic of China under Cai Yuanpei announced plans to convene a Conference on Unification of Pronunciation. Under the direction of Wu Zhihui, the meetings commenced in February 1913 and were attended by many of the country’s most prominent language reformers. Over the span of approximately three months, and a contentious and complex set of discussions, the committee announced an agreement that centered around a phonetic notation system for Chinese known as zhuyin zimu—or “phonetic alphabet.”66 Here, then, was the opportunity that Western typewriter companies had been waiting for: a Sino-foreign script, invented “by and for” the Chinese, but employing a Western system of script.

  Legros and Grant were not alone in imbuing this new “Chinese alphabet” with a sense of possibility and promise. In the very same month they submitted their patent application, so too did J. Frank Allard, an engineer working in collaboration with the Underwood Typewriter Company to retrofit a standard Underwood machine with the new phonetic symbols.67 In April 1920, the Telegraph-Herald announced that the “Chinese Alphabet has been reduced.”68 “Chinese of future generations,” the article began, “will write in phonetic script and use a typewriter with only 39 characters instead of plying a brush to draw 10,000 or more hieroglyphics if mission workers succeed in an effort they are making to revolutionize handwriting in use in China for more than 4000 years.” The system had been developed in 1903 in England by Wang Chao, the article explained, and had already been the subject of interest for designers of a Chinese typewriter. Reverend E.G. Tewksbury of Shanghai, it was reported, “has put the new script into use on American typewriters with complete success,” with the font being provided by Chinese engravers. In August 1920, Popular Science featured an advertisement for yet another phonetic Chinese typewriter: the Hammond Multiplex.69 By the time Robert McKean Jones signed his name to the Remington Phonetic Chinese typewriter, then, his was already one in a long genealogy.

  Even as the dream of a “Chinese alphabet” seemed to be coming true, a stark reality confounded the aspirations of these Western typewriter manufacturers: zhuyin was never meant to replace Chinese characters. It was never meant to become a “Chinese alphabet” in the sense understood by Remington, Hammond, Underwood, and others. Rather, zhuyin was meant to serve as a pedagogical, paratextual system through which to inculcate in the Chinese people the standard, nondialectal pronunciations of Chinese characters. This fact was lost, however, on many foreign observers, most notably foreign inventors eager to develop phonetic Chinese typewriters and hot-metal composing machines. Much like Vladimir and Estragon waiting endlessly
for Godot, observers of China persisted in a kind of imperturbable anticipation, poised to wait endlessly for a Cadmus—a figure preordained to come to China at some point (always in the near future) and bring with him the wonder and salvation that is the alphabet. As the mythological founder of Thebes and brother of Europa, Cadmus was credited by Herodotus as being responsible for introducing Phoenician script to the Greeks—the forerunner to the Greek alphabet, that invention to which Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, and many others have attributed causal power as a contributor to the Greek Miracle, as discussed earlier. If only Cadmus would hasten to arrive here in the Celestial Kingdom, all of the many woes that had beset the world’s last great non-cenemic script would be resolved.