The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  Combinatorialism would be essential as well. Nine-tenths of Chinese characters were composed in a combinatorial method, Lin explained in the course of his 1931 letter, with a left-side element called a “radical” and a right-side element called a “phonetic.” Overall, Lin explained, there were approximately 1,300 right-side phonetic elements, while only around 80 left-side radicals. “By the combination of these elements,” Lin wrote, perhaps unaware that he was invoking the spirits of Legrand, Beyerhaus, Qi Xuan, and others, “any number of Chinese characters can be formed, actually over 30,000 characters.” To illustrate his approach, he provided an English-language analogy. Lin Yutang likened Chinese radicals and phonetics to English prefixes and suffixes, using the English-language “COM-” and “-BINE” to demonstrate how his system would work.34 Like “com-,” these “standardized left parts” would be concatenated “with any right part to form a perfect square beautiful character” (figure 6.6). Likewise, his “standardized right parts” could be combined “with any left part”35 just like the English “-bine.” Lin included in his letter a piece of folded paper, notated “2 pieces showing combination of right and left components into perfectly square and beautiful Chinese characters.”36

  6.6 Lin Yutang’s 1931 letter, demonstrating how characters would be formed on his Chinese typewriter

  Up to this point, the reader will notice, Lin’s description of his typewriter differed not at all from many of the Chinese machines that came before. Indistinguishable thus far from Qi Xuan’s combinatorial device from the 1910s, and sharing many of the same design principles as those manufactured by Commercial Press, it seems to have little more to examine. It was in Lin’s third step, however, that something entirely new began to take shape. Rather than trying to fit all of the necessary characters and character components onto a standard Chinese typewriter tray bed, or on a cylindrical drum like those found on early prototypes by Qi Xuan and Zhou Houkun, Lin would steal a page from Chinese telegraphy and sequester all Chinese characters to the interior of his machine—away from the naked-eye view of the typist. Surrogacy, as we examined in chapter 2, would thus prove central to his typewriter as well. As with the Chinese telegraph code, the operator of Lin’s imagined device would not manipulate or traffic in Chinese characters directly, but indirectly—in this case, by means of a keyboard-based control system. In one sense, then, Lin’s machine would resemble Robert McKean Jones’s “Chinese typewriter with no Chinese,” with a keyboard that contained few if any Chinese characters. But unlike that of Jones, somehow Lin’s machine would produce Chinese-character output.37 The typist would use a keyboard not to type characters directly so much as to instruct the machine as to which characters he or she wanted to type. “The process of printing a word,” Lin explained of his three-part process, “is therefore similar to printing an English word of three letters, like ‘and’ or ‘the,’ except that the first two keys serve merely to bring the word into printing position, while with the third key, the whole word is printed complete.”38

  As part of his growing interest in typewriting, a concern laid out in these letters from the 1930s, Lin began to move away from the framework of retrieval and search—the domain of dictionaries, phone books, and card catalogs—to that of inscription. To make this transition from search to search-writing, however, would require Lin to transform the character retrieval frameworks he and others had worked on in the 1910s and 1920s. For the typewriter he had in mind, these symbolic systems would not suffice—a limitation we can only understand if we take apart Lin’s MingKwai typewriter to grasp precisely how it functioned. When we do, we find the ways in which Lin’s taxonomic thought, once restricted to the world of Chinese dictionaries and indexes, was refracted through the prism of the mechanical and material concerns of his device.

  As outlined in his 1931 letter, Lin had set out to design a typewriter that, like those of both Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan, would be outfitted with both full-body common usage Chinese characters, and divisible-type-style character components. Unlike these earlier systems, however, none of these characters or character components would be directly viewable or manipulated by the typist. They would be inside the machine. As a result, one of the first challenges Lin faced was how to fit these thousands of graphemes as tightly as possible inside the chassis of the MingKwai device, while also making them accessible. To achieve this, Lin departed from the dominant Chinese typewriter design of the era—the rectangular tray bed we have come to know well over the course of this study—and instead contemplated ways of wrapping or folding up his Chinese characters into a more condensed space.

  The design he settled upon was something like a planetary system, with moons, planets, and a central star. The proverbial moons in Lin’s system were a series of eight-sided metal bars, with his Chinese characters and radicals engraved upon each of their surfaces. With each of these octagonal bars long enough to fit 29 characters along its length, Lin could fit a total of 232 characters or character pieces on each bar (twenty-nine characters per side, multiplied by eight sides). Taking six of these bars, he fastened them to a circular, rotating gear—like six moons revolving around a shared planetary axis, as well as their own individual axes of rotation. Making six of these six-bar clusters in all, he in turn fastened these to a larger, circular, rotating drum—like six planets rotating about a central star. All told, then, Lin’s system encompassed a total of forty-three separate axes of rotation: thirty-six metal bars rotating around their own lunar axes, six higher-order cylinders rotating around their own planetary axes, and finally one highest-order cylinder rotating around a singular, stellar axis (figure 6.7).39 Owing to this ingenious design, one in which each of the eight faces on every one of Lin’s metal bars could be brought into the printing position by means of a coordinated rotation process, Lin’s machine boasted more than three times the capacity of the tray bed on a common usage Chinese typewriter, all in a smaller space. MingKwai offered up a total of 8,352 possible graphemes in all, with which it would be possible to compose every Chinese character in existence.

  6.7 Mechanical design of MingKwai

  The second obvious challenge was that of layout and categorization: according to what taxonomic system would Lin’s 8,352 Chinese characters and components be arrayed within this metallic hard drive? In answering this question, Lin would need his taxonomic system to function in ways that departed dramatically from the earlier character retrieval systems he and others had experimented with in the 1910s and 1920s. A dictionary organization system is one that does not require taxonomic evenness—that is, there is no need for the “A” section of a dictionary to contain the same number of words as the “G” or “Z” sections, or for the water-radical (氵) section of the Kangxi Dictionary to contain the same number of characters as the turtle-radical (龜) section. For Lin’s typewriter to function, however, he needed to arrive at a categorical system in which each of his categories contained the same number: no more than eight characters in all, and ideally no fewer. This precise upper limit, we recall, was due to the “Magic Eye” viewfinder, through which the machine presented a total of up to, but no more than, eight character candidates from which the user could select. Even a ninth character in any one of the taxa would have sent Lin Yutang back to the drawing board, and back to his checkbook. There was a second, critical challenge, moreover. Lin also needed to fill each taxon as fully as possible. Underutilization of taxa—categories containing only three, four, or five characters, for example—ran the risk of severely diminishing the total capacity of the machine by hundreds if not thousands of characters, or requiring Lin Yutang to increase the total number of keys on the keyboard to handle a larger number of categories. Again, either eventuality would diminish the machine and cost money.

  If all of these considerations were not challenging enough, Lin would also need to attend to questions of “user experience,” to use the parlance of our own time—or as Du Dingyou had phrased it in 1925, the “psychology of how the masses search for c
haracters.” If we think back to the mechanical Chinese typewriters being used in offices across China at this moment in history, the typist could see all 2,500 characters on the tray bed, albeit in mirror image. They could scan, approximate, and rely upon a kind of metropolitan wayfinder’s method of reaching a destination: setting out in the general direction of one’s endpoint, using landmarks along the way, and asking for further directions while en route.

  As for the typewriter Lin Yutang had in mind, however, Chinese characters would not be present and available in the same naked-eye sense. Characters would instead be sequestered to the interior of the machine, away from the direct observation and manipulation of the operator. No longer navigating by sight and by stars, the typist on Lin Yutang’s machine would need to rely exclusively on maps and coordinates: protocols and symbolic abstractions. Lin’s machine would be a zero tolerance device in which every successive manipulation of the keys either worked, or not.

  With this in mind, Lin could not afford to permit the material or machinic requirements of his device to result in a keyboard that confused or confounded potential users. Not only did Lin have to develop taxonomic categories that contained no more than (and ideally no fewer than) eight Chinese characters in all, but the symbols and protocols by which a user would “call up” each of these eight character clusters—that is, the symbols on the keyboard of his typewriter—would have to be intuitive and meaningful to the operator.

  With the global debut of MingKwai in 1947, the fruits of Lin’s labor were found on the keyboard of the machine. With the exception of six keys on which only one symbol appeared, the majority of keys featured a cluster of anywhere from two to five symbols, all as a means of spreading out and filling up each of his eight-character categories. Lin created novel groupings, moreover, clustering radicals together based on vernacular notions of resemblance. On one key, for example, the radicals xin (忄) and mu (木) appeared together, presumably because of their shared orthographic features: a pronounced vertical stroke, flanked by short accompanying strokes. A similar clustering was created for mu (目) and ri (日), which Lin assigned to a single key—radicals which bore no etymological relationship to one another, but which Lin grouped together presumably because of their shared rectangular shape.

  Although groupings such as these might strike us as orthographically “natural,” nevertheless each of Lin’s clusters was unprecedented in Chinese linguistic practice. Detached entirely from etymological or semantic concerns, Lin created these groupings based upon what we might consider a pattern-finding naiveté—a kind of architectural classification in which “tall-thin” shapes were placed in one group, “rectangular shapes” in another, and so forth. The clustering of conventional shapes was clearly insufficient for the inventor, moreover. Lin also created his own proprietary “pseudo-radicals”: uncanny shapes that, while they came ever so close to resembling conventional Chinese radicals and strokes, were utterly alien within the history of the Chinese script. One such symbol appeared along the bottom row of keys, fourth from the left: the Chinese character horse [ma 馬], cut in two and leaving only the bottom half.

  Performing MingKwai: Lin Taiyi as the Chinese Everywoman

  May 22, 1947, would live in the memory of the Lin family for a very long time: the day that Lin Yutang and his daughter Lin Taiyi brought the MingKwai machine home from the workshop, “as if bringing a newborn baby home from the hospital.”40 At eleven in the morning, the father-daughter duo carried the machine out from the workshop, and upon reaching their apartment, placed it on the table in their parlor. “When I sat in front of the machine to study typing on it,” Lin Taiyi would later recall, “I could sense that it was a miracle.”41 Lin Yutang gestured to his daughter to try it out, typing whatever she pleased.42 The experience was clearly a moving one for Taiyi: “Even though it cost 120,000 US dollars, even though it has saddled us with a lifetime of debt, this creation of my father that he had worked his entire life on, this newborn baby birthed with such difficulty, it was worth it.”43

  Baby metaphors appeared frequently in Lin family writings about MingKwai, alerting us to the profoundly personal nature of this project. In a private correspondence from April 2, 1947, Lin Yutang sent a photograph of the recently completed machine to his close associates and friends Pearl S. Buck and Richard Walsh. Upon the photograph, he penned: To Dick-n-Pearl, This the first photo of the baby. Y.T. (figure 6.8).

  6.8 Postcard to Richard Walsh and Pearl S. Buck

  The summer of 1947 belonged to MingKwai. Lin Yutang set out upon an extensive promotional campaign, convening with journalists, contributing articles to the popular and technical press, and corresponding with cultural and political figures in China and the United States. He was in regular contact with his financial backers at the Mergenthaler Linotype company as well, along with executives at IBM and the Remington Typewriter Company, both of whom had expressed interest in the system. Lin cultivated endorsements from leading Chinese intellectuals and members of China’s military, political, and financial circles as well. Lieutenant General Pang-Tsu Mow of the Chinese Air Force called MingKwai a “great contribution to human society,” while Tuh-Yueh Lee, manager of the New York offices of the Bank of China, remarked that he was “not prepared for anything so compact and at the same time comprehensive, so easy of operation and yet so adequate to even the most complicated characters.” “It takes so little learning, whether for Chinese, or for Americans who don’t know Chinese characters, to become familiar with the keyboard,” linguist and Harvard professor of Chinese Zhao Yuanren (Yuen Ren Chao) commented. Zhao continued: “I think this is it.”44

  A defining moment in the MingKwai campaign was the demonstration of the device at the offices of the Remington Typewriter Company in Manhattan. If they saw in MingKwai the same sense of promise that Lin Yutang clearly did, they might place their formidable corporate weight behind the project, in cooperation with Mergenthaler. This would be a victory of immeasurable proportion for Lin Yutang, effectively winning over the two giants of modern information technology in the domains of both typewriting and Linotype. As Lin Taiyi describes in her biography of her father, the morning of the Remington demonstration was a stormy one. “Father and I wrapped up the machine in a wooden chest, took it from the apartment to the offices of Remington Typewriter Company in Manhattan,” she reminisced. “Inside of the wooden box was our baby typewriter.”45 The responsibility of demonstrating the machine would fall to Lin Taiyi. Here in a quiet and severe boardroom sat representatives of the Remington company, with the typewriter placed on a small table.46

  Lin Yutang began by painting a portrait for the Remington executives. One-third of the world’s population used Chinese characters in one form or another—either completely, as in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, or partially, as in Japan and Korea. Engineers had thus far foundered in their attempts to produce a machine to serve this immense language community. The common usage Chinese typewriter developed by Commercial Press of Shanghai, or by Japanese competitors, offered no enduring solution to the puzzle of Chinese information technology, Lin emphasized. MingKwai was the answer. “After father had finished speaking,” Lin Taiyi recalled, “he pointed to me to start typing.”

  Among the many bold claims made on behalf of MingKwai, none was bolder than when Lin Yutang called his machine “The Only Chinese Typewriter Designed for Everybody’s Use.” The promotional brochure phrased it even more succinctly: “Requires no previous training” (figure 6.9).

  6.9 Promotional image: “The Only Chinese Typewriter Designed for Everybody’s Use”

  This insistence on effortlessness foisted heavy responsibility upon Lin Taiyi’s shoulders, since she was the person who regularly found herself responsible for demonstrating MingKwai to journalists who visited the Lin family home. If they were to trust her father’s claims, it certainly could not be Lin Yutang himself who presented the apparatus to skeptical observers—this linguist, this New York Times bestselling author, this creator of t
he machine. It had to be an “average” user, and she would need to make it look easy.

  The person demonstrating the machine would also need to be a woman. We have already seen how, in China at this time, the ranks of Chinese typists were populated by a combination of young women and young men. The clerical worlds in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the greater part of the world, however, had long since become the nearly exclusive domain of women. By virtue of the decidedly international quality of Lin Yutang’s promotional and financial efforts—efforts that found him appealing to business executives, cultural organizations, and media outlets primarily in the United States—this equation of “typist” and “young woman” would need to be observed carefully.47

  Lin Taiyi recounted the event in vivid detail:

  Under the crowd’s watchful eyes, I turned on the machine. I pressed a key, but the typewriter did nothing. I pressed another key, but again nothing happened. I felt terribly embarrassed. My mouth went completely dry. I pressed another key, but it was no use. Father rushed over to my side, but the typewriter simply wouldn’t move. The meeting room was dead quiet. The only thing you could hear was the sound of one key being pressed after the next. After a few minutes father had no choice but to apologize to the group, put it back in its oil rag, and slink out in embarrassment.48