How a long-lost Chinese typewriter changed modern computing : NPR
The keys to the Mingkwai typewriter allow typing to find and recover Chinese characters.
Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
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Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
Stanford, California – Researchers in the United States, Taiwan and China are buzzing on the discovery of an old typewriter, because the long lost machine is part of the Origin of Modern Chinese IT – and central to current questions on language policy.
The entry of China into modern IT has been essential to allow the country to become the technological power it is today. But before that, some of the most brilliant Chinese minds of the 20th century had to find a way to exploit the complex pictograms that make up Chinese written in a typewriter, and later a computer.
A man succeeded more than any other before him. His name was Lin Yutang, a famous linguist and writer in southern China. He made a single prototype of his Chinese typewriter, which he nicknamed the Mingkwai, “brilliant and clear” in Mandarin Chinese.
Patent files and detailed diagrams of the 1940s typewriter are public, but the physical prototype has disappeared. The researchers supposed that he was lost in history.
“I had really, really thought that it was gone,” explains Thomas Mullaney, professor of history at the University of Stanford who has studied Chinese IT for two decades and is the author of The Chinese typewriter.
A discovery of chance
Thomas Mullaney and Zhaohui Xue, curator of Chinese studies, examine the Mingkwai prototype at the University of Stanford.
Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
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Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
Mullaney was at a conference last year when he received a message that someone in New York was found a strange machine in his basement and posted a photo on Facebook.
“It was a sleepless night. I was looking for at random who could be the owner,” recalls Mullaney, laughing.
Finally, the owner set her hand. They had acquired the typewriter of a parent who had worked at Mergenthaler Linotype, once the most eminent American manufacturers of composition machines. The company helped develop the only known prototype of the Mingkwai typewriter.
Mullaney later confirmed that the machine found in New York’s basement was indeed the only prototype of the Mingkwai Linvy typewriter.
“It is like a family member who presented himself at your door and that you have just supposed that you would never see them,” explains Mullaney.
A globalist vision
The unique design of the Mingkwai was a turning point in the history of Chinese IT.
Elisabeth vo Boch / Stanford
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Elisabeth vo Boch / Stanford
The history of the reasons why such a typewriter still exists is parallel to political upheavals and conflicts on Chinese identity and politics in the 20th century.
Lin, its inventor, was born in 1895 in southern China during the end of a faulty Qing dynasty. Student activists and radical thinkers were desperate to reform and strengthen China. Some have proposed the dismantling of traditional Chinese culture in favor of Western science and technology, even completely eliminating Chinese characters in favor of a Roman alphabet.
“Lin Yutang has traced a path in the middle,” said Chia-Fang Tsai, director of the Lin Yutang, a foundation based in Taiwan to commemorate the linguist’s work. This average path would go east and west and preserve the Chinese language in the digital age.
Chinese typing was a monumental challenge. Chinese has no alphabet. Instead, he uses tens of thousands of pictograms. When Lin started work at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no standardized version of Mandarin Chinese. Instead, people were talking about hundreds of dialects and languages, which means that there was no singular phonetic spelling of each word.
Lin had financial support from the American writer Pearl S. Buck to create the typewriter, but he also sank a large part of his own savings in the project while the ball costs.
“He had spent a lot of money. Many,” said Jill Lai Miller, the Linen granddaughter. “But he was not the type to carry a grudge” against his benefactors, “she said.
One last secret
Discovered in a basement in New York, the prototype was acquired by the Stanford libraries.
Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
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Elisabeth von Boch / Stanford
The machine was acquired this year by the University of Stanford, which recently cleaned and restored the machine for several decades. It is kept in the university library in East Asia and will soon be on public exhibition.
One morning in June, Mullaney carefully opened the personalized wooden boxing of the machine to show how the typewriter works.
The ingenuity of the typewriter comes from how Lin has decided to break Chinese pictograms: by their forms, not sounds. Dactylo can look for certain combinations of shapes by pressing the ergonomic keyboard. Then a small screen above the keyboard (Lin called her his “Magic Eye”) offers the typing of up to eight possible characters who could correspond. In this way, the typewriter has the possibility of recovering up to 90,000 characters.
“I am not a theological and religious person. It’s like Eve. This is the beginning of everything,” explains Mullaney. The concepts of the Mingkwai typewriter underlie the way we have Chinese, Japanese and Korean today.
“What a large part of these individuals [including Lin] Let us try to say that we do not buy the idea that the only entry price to modernity is our culture, our language, that we must simply leave this to the door, “explains Mullaney.
Ecoded in machine engineering was an ambitious globalism. The way of breaking languages by linen by the form of their words rather than their sounds or alphabets meant that his machine can theoretically type English, Russian and Japanese also, according to the type of typewriter.
“One thing that was very interesting … in Li Yutang’s thought on Chinese and Chinese culture, it is that it should not be island. It must have this porous border, it must be greater and be able to communicate and speak with other cultures,” explains Yangyang Cheng, who first wrote on the discovery of the typewriter.
This ability to transparently translate between languages and identities derives from bilingual and nomadic life, known as Cheng, “in particular at a time when the cultural and political contours of the world were redesigned.”
They were redesigned following an unleashed Chinese empire. Lin has studied in China and Europe, but lived in the United States for three decades. Later, after the Communist Party took control of continental China, he took up residence in Taiwan and Hong Kong, then a British colony.
As Lin filed the American patent for his typewriter in 1946, a large part of his hope had dissipated for the open multicultural China for which he had designed the typewriter.
Mullaney is now doing full -time research of the typewriter, trying to understand how its mechanical bowels work, with the distant dream of reproducing it one day. He recently discovered that the ink coil of the typewriter was still completely intact inside.
“You would need the type of technology on which they used, such as discoveries of the Dead Sea scrolling and things like that, but you will notice that the ink coil is still there,” he said, using a dental mirror to look inside the machine.
The ink coil could contain traces of the latest words that Lin or her daughter have typed on the machine – which perhaps means that the inventor’s own words are also in his magic machine.
