The Chinese Typewriter
Page 26
Returning to Remington and Jones, we see how the many “false Cadmus sightings” in the twentieth century may have dented, but in no way destroyed, confidence in his eventual arrival. (“I can’t go on like this,” Estragon protests. “That’s what you think,” Vladimir responds.) Not five months after Remington submitted its application to the Patent Office, a full-page advertisement appeared on the back cover of China’s premier language reform journal, the National Language Monthly (Guoyu yuekan), which regularly featured the writings of Zhao Yuanren, Li Jinxi, Qian Xuantong, Zhou Zuoren, Fu Sinian, and other influential figures in the country’s language reform movement. The advertisement featured the Underwood Chinese National Phonetic Typewriter (Entehua Zhonghua guoyin daziji), offering a photographic preview of the keyboard, and the assurance that “its construction is the same as the English language Underwood Typewriter” (qi gouzao shi yu entehua yingyu daziji xiangtong). Along the bottom edge, readers saw the output of the machine, in a single line of zhuyin script: ㄣㄊㄜㄏㄨㄚ ㄍㄨㄛ|ㄣ ㄉㄚㄗㄐ| (entehua guoyin daziji) or “Underwood National Phonetic Typewriter.”70
Despite such giddy optimism within the industry, all attempts to market and mass-produce phonetic Chinese typewriters failed. Western companies never understood—or perhaps even bothered to understand—the limited orientation of these phoneticization movements among the “Celestials.” Instead, in their never-ending wait for the annunciation of the “Chinese alphabet,” Remington, Underwood, and others stood poised and alert, ears perked to hear the footfalls of an approaching Cadmus before their competitors did, so as to be the first to meet him at the gates and capitalize on his arrival.
So entrenched was this idea of a phonetic Chinese typewriter that, indeed, even the utter failure of these phonetic Chinese machines escaped the attention of Western media. When Jones died in 1933 in Stony Point, New York, his obituary made no reference to his Arabic machine, nor to the keyboards he designed for Urdu or other scripts. Instead, the notice of his death spotlighted perhaps the only keyboard in the inventor’s career that ended in utter failure: “Robert McKean Jones: Inventor of Chinese Typewriter Was Able Linguist.” “The development of the Chinese typewriter twenty years ago by Mr. Jones,” it continued, “was considered an outstanding achievement. The many characters in the language were believed to constitute an insuperable handicap. Mr. Jones, an accomplished linguist, worked for years in consolidating the various Chinese characters on the keyboard of a machine in a manner that is legible and intelligible to citizens of that country where there are many dialects and many alphabets.”71
At the World’s Fair: Chinese Typewriting between Mimesis and Alterity
Whatever strides the Chinese typewriter might have been making at home, the domestic industry alone was clearly not enough to cement China’s place within the global family of modern technolinguistic countries. As long as the “real” typewriter existed out in the wider world, and as long as the world outside China remained unprepared to conceptualize the Chinese typewriter as anything but an absurdity, the status of this machine would remain in question—particularly its eligibility to bear the moniker of “typewriter.” In 1919, the journal Asia featured a photograph of Fong Sec, then editor in chief of Shanghai Press, standing before a Commercial Press machine. “Dr. Fong Sec,” the caption read, “stands for the best type of the efficient, modern Chinese,” in what would begin as a glowing report. “As an editor of the Shanghai Press, the largest and best equipped of Chinese printing firms, responsible for the publication of almost all Chinese text-books and the dissemination of literature throughout Central China, he holds a position more significant from the point of view of the enlightenment of the people than that of any official of state.” What praise was afforded Fong Sec himself was promptly withdrawn, however, once focus shifted to the contrivance before which he stood. “In this picture he is shown with the elephant of typewriters,” the article continued, “conceived by a son of the fathers of invention.”72
During the 1920s, Commercial Press set out on its first concerted effort to win over the Western world and change its views of the Chinese typewriter. The machine’s global debut took place in Philadelphia at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition of 1926, mounted in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On display would be the cultural and industrial heritage of the global community, with pavilions dedicated to Japan, Persia, India, and more. The Chinese pavilion was overseen in part by Zhang Xiangling, the Chinese consul general in New York, a man for whom the presentation of his country on the global stage was of the utmost concern.73 Three years prior to the exhibit, circa 1923, Zhang had paid a visit to the Philadelphia Commercial Museum and its display dedicated to Chinese products. “They were disappointed,” a report from the period read, referring to Zhang and a group of Chinese businessmen who had accompanied him, “to find that the exhibit, large and handsome as it is, represented the China of the past rather than the new China with its diversified production.” “For instance, there were relatively few specimens illustrating the modern industries of the country and the manufactures which China has developed within recent years.” To remedy this situation, Consul General Zhang promised to the museum curators that he would reach out to parties back home and secure a “representative series of samples of Chinese products” for the museum. A few months later, Zhang’s promise was fulfilled, with seven cases of materials arriving in Philadelphia, sent by the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce. Included in the collection were samples of silk fabrics, wicker furniture, tobacco and cigarettes, tooth powder, and hosiery, among many other items.74
The Chinese typewriter by Commercial Press was selected as one such exemplary object—a device to display the progress of the nation in the industrial arts, while at the same time situating this machine in a longer framework of Chinese civilizational history. Upon entering the pavilion, one immediately encountered the American and ROC flags, draped side by side, as well as fine silks, ornate umbrellas, tea pots, porcelain vases, five-colored glass, calligraphic scrolls, and landscape paintings. Along the rear wall, just right of center under an image of George Washington and a painting of a wildcat poised upon a tree limb, was a display case with an engraved plaque: “Chinese Typewriter” (figure 4.7).75
4.7 Shu Zhendong Chinese typewriter (lower left) at the Philadelphia world’s fair
In preparation for the machine’s global debut, Commercial Press crafted an English-language brochure for the Shu-style machine. The tone was carefully phrased for a foreign audience, taking the machine out of its indigenous framework of manuscript and printing, and in a rare instance suggested that it was in fact on par with the real typewriter of the Western world. “The Chinese typewriter manufactured by the Commercial Press solves a serious problem in office administration in China,” the brochure read. “The machine has all the advantages of a foreign typewriter” (figure 4.8).76 As commissioner general representing China at the Philadelphia world’s fair, Zhang must have been pleased by the typewriter’s performance and reception.77 Commercial Press received a “Medal of Honor” for “Ingenuity and Adaptability of the Chinese Typewriter.”78 “It is a miraculous achievement of the inventor that, although there are 3,000 characters in the font,” a Philadelphia guidebook read in a rare celebration of a Chinese machine, “yet a typist, after the practice of one or two weeks, will be able to locate any character instantly. 2,000 characters can be written after two months’ training, and greater speed can be obtained by longer practice.”79 News from Philadelphia began to reach China starting in the winter of 1927, moreover. On January 12, Shenbao relayed communications from Zhang, containing information on those Chinese companies that received honors and awards. Among those awarded was Commercial Press, specifically for the Shu-style Chinese machine.80
4.8 Commercial Press brochure for the world’s fair
A medal of honor in Philadelphia was insufficient to quiet criticism and denigration, however, n
ot only from foreigners but also closer to home. In 1926, the same year as the world’s fair, linguist and vociferous character abolitionist Qian Xuantong once again railed against the inefficiency of character-based systems of categorization, reproduction, and transmission, leveling a critique against a wide range of objects. Beginning with a critique of character-based dictionaries, catalogs, and indexes, Qian argued that “Chinese characters offer no effective solution, whether it be stroke-count, rhyme schemes, or by relying on the most dog-fart of them all, that radical system from the Kangxi Dictionary.”81 Qian reserved his most strident criticism for the Chinese typewriter:
And then there are typewriters on which one cannot have less than two to three thousand characters. The surface area of two to three thousand characters is not small, mind you. When typing, no matter how familiar one is with these two to three thousand characters, one has little choice but to search for each character one by one. The first character is all the way in the northeastern corner. The second character is over in the southwest corner, eighth from the bottom. The third character is, once again, up in the northeast, in the third column just off center, eleventh from the top. The fourth character is up in the northwest corner, down a bit. The fifth character is once again in the middle, just a bit southeast of central. And so on. It’s really enough to leave one bewildered (mumi wuse). And when you come to a character that’s not on the machine, and when you can’t find it in the “rarely used character tray bed” (since the rarely used character tray bed doesn’t have all the characters either), and when you have to write in the character by hand, then you’ll see for yourself how much of a hassle it is. Phonetic script has only a few dozen characters and a handful of symbols, so it goes without saying how convenient it is for typing.82
Qian’s cartographic imagery was playful and devastating. Setting the stage for his critique with the deft use of the term “surface area” (mianji)—a term typically reserved for territorial expanses—he transformed the Chinese typist into a lost soul wandering across an expansive landscape of the twice-repeated “two to three thousand characters.” To elongate this sense of distance, Qian expressed the location of characters on the tray bed using cardinal directions, the way one might express the location of provinces or cities in China itself. Qian’s first hypothetical character was located somewhere in the province of Fengtian, his second in Yunnan or southern Sichuan, his third perhaps in Rehe, his fourth in eastern Xinjiang, and his fifth in Shaanxi.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the Chinese pavilion in Philadelphia seems to have inspired yet another instantiation of the Chinese monster we first examined in chapter 1. In the February 17, 1927, issue of Life magazine, cartoonist Gilbert Levering presented his vision of a “Chinese Language Typewriter”: a colossal contraption featuring a keyboard roughly thirty keys wide by thirty-five keys deep—for a rough total of 1,050 keys in all (figure 4.9).83
4.9 “Chinese Language Typewriter” in Life magazine, 1927
Twenty-seven years since making his first appearance in the popular press, it would seem, “Tap-Key” was alive and well.
Notes
1 The surface of each character slug measured approximately one-half centimeter squared, fitted upon a base that measured some one-and-a-half centimeters tall. The base of the machine, constructed in wood and used to store various tools and implements for the machine—a cleaning brush, a pair of tweezers, a small wrench—measured 41 centimeters deep, 47.3 centimeters wide, and 6 centimeters high. Atop this sat the machine. Attached to the front of the machine was the character tray guide, a thin, metal-rimmed glass frame in which a paper guide to the characters was housed. The glass frame was to scale with the tray bed, but with the edge measuring some 45 centimeters in width and 25.5 centimeters in height. The platen of the machine measured 36.5 centimeters wide.
2 User’s Manual for Chinese Typewriter Manufactured by Shanghai Commercial Press (Shanghai yinshuguan zhizao Huawen daziji shuomingshu) [上海印書館製造華文打字機說明書] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1917 [October]).
3 Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004).
4 “Summer Vacation at the China Railway School (Zhonghua tielu xuexiao shujia) [中華鐵路學校暑假],” Shenbao (July 5, 1916), 10.
5 “Zhou and Wang are Quintessential Scholars (Zhou Wang liang jun juexue) [周王兩君絕學],” Shenbao (July 24, 1916), 10. While Zhou’s audience was doubtless intrigued by this young man’s invention, part of his appeal was also his status as a returned student who enjoyed firsthand experience of the United States. Whether by invitation or his own initiative, part of Zhou’s presentation on his Chinese typewriter was given over to a brief lecture on “Black Schools” in the United States, accompanied by a set of lantern slides recently purchased by the Provincial Education Committee on the subject of “American Blacks” (Meiguo Heiren).
6 Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, January 9, 1917, in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 6 (juan 6), 141.
7 Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, May 26, 1919 (Tuesday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 71.
8 “News from the Nanyang University Engineering Association (Nanyang daxue gongchenghui jinxun) [南洋大學工程會近訊],” Shenbao (November 10, 1922), 14.
9 See “Jiangsu Department of Industry Hires Zhou Houkun as Advisor (Su shiyeting pin Zhou Houkun wei guwen) [蘇實業廳聘周厚坤為顧問],” Shenbao (October 21, 1923), 15. In a 1922 article, Zhou Houkun is referred to by his courtesy name Pengxi [朋西]. “Wuchang Inspection Office Examines Hanyeping Remittances (Wuchang jianting zi cha Hanyeping jiekuan) [武昌檢廳咨查漢冶萍解欵],” Shenbao (August 26, 1922), 15.
10 Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, May 26, 1919 (Tuesday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 71.
11 “Commercial Press Establishes Chinese Typewriting Class (Shangwu yinshuguan she Huawen daziji lianxi ke) [商務印書館設華文打字機練習課],” Education and Vocation (Jiaoyu yu zhiye) [教育與職業] 10 (1918): 8.
12 Shu Changyu [舒昌鈺] (aka Shu Zhendong [舒震東]), “Thoughts While Researching a Typewriter for China (Yanjiu Zhongguo daziji shi zhi ganxiang) [研究中國打字機時之感想],” Tongji 2 (1918): 156; Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, February 24, 1919 (Monday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 30. Zhang Yuanji also contemplated a multinational manufacturing plan, in which Shu Zhendong might have precision parts manufactured in the United States, and presumably then have them assembled in China. Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, April 16, 1920 (Friday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 205. Zhang Yuanji told Bao Xianchang to have precision parts created in the United States by Shu Zhendong, then returned to Shanghai for assembly. Apparently Bao asked Shu Zhendong, but Shu thought this would be a hassle, and that it was unnecessary to accelerate the process. See Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, April 19, 1920 (Monday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 205.
13 Ping Zhou, “A Record of Viewing the Chinese Typewriter Manufactured by Commercial Press (Canguan shangwu yinshuguan zhizao Huawen daziji ji) [參觀商務印書館制造華文打字機記],” Shangye zazhi [商業雜誌] 2, no. 12 (1927): 1–4.
14 Dissatisfied with this first model, Shu subsequently set out on a tour of Europe and the United States, with the express purpose of visiting factories and developing novel approaches to the problem of Chinese typewriting. Upon his return to Shanghai, he set about developing an improved model of Chinese typewriter, a process that went through five iterations, or “styles” (shi). A timeline of models outlined in a later manual cites 1919 as the year in which the “third style” of Shu Zhendong machine was released.
15 John A. Lent and Ying Xu, “Chinese Animation Film: From Experimentation to Digitalization,” in Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen, Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 112.
16 The pair later went on to produce a series of animated shorts, as well as Th
e Camel’s Dance (Luotuo xianwu) (1935) and the country’s first full-length animated feature, Princess Iron Fan (Tieshan gongzhu) (1941).
17 Ping Zhou, “A Record of Viewing the Chinese Typewriter,” 2.
18 Gan Chunquan and Xu Yizhi, eds., Essential Knowledge for Secretaries: Requirements of a Chinese Typist (Shuji fuwu bibei: yiming Huawen dazi wenshu yaojue) [書記服務必備一名華文打字文書要決] (Shanghai: Renwen yinshuguan, 1935), 25–30.
19 Ping Zhou, “A Record of Viewing the Chinese Typewriter,” 2. In addition to the more than seven thousand characters on the common use tray and the secondary and tertiary use boxes, moreover, the machine was also outfitted with the English alphabet, Arabic numerals, the Chinese phonetic alphabet (zhuyin), and Western-style punctuation marks.
20 Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, April 16, 1920 (Friday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji, vol. 7 (juan 7), 205.
21 “Consulate Purchases Chinese Typewriter (Lingshiguan zhi Hanwen daziji) [領事館置漢文打字機],” Chinese Times (Dahan gongbao) [大漢公報] (May 18, 1925), 3.
22 “Business News (Shangchang xiaoxi) [商場消息],” Shenbao (October 27, 1926), 19–20.
23 “Report on Machinery on Display at the Department of Forestry and Agriculture (Chenlie suo jishu nonglinbu yanjiu tan) [陳列所機術農林部研究談],” Shenbao (November 27, 1921), 15.