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The First Chinese Typwriter

How to adapt to linguistic differences with evolving technology.

Introduction

The first English typewriter was created in the late 1800s. This sparked the beginning of a mass communication era. Information was being spread at a faster pace and to a wider variety of people. While typewriters in latin based language at the same time, typewriters in other languages were not yet produced. The logistics of typing, especially on a QUERTY-style keyboard, were inapplicable to other languages. For a set of letters to be laid out on a keyboard, the langue must follow these rules on a typewriter.

For languages such as Arabic, Korean and Japanese, this was impossible. Chinese was also one of the languages that people could not produce an ordered keyboard in. In Chinese there are tens of thousands of characters. Unlike those of latin-based languages, the characters of Chinese change in shape and can represent the vocalisation of more than one sound when being used for speech.

Challenges

Because of the complexity of some non-western languages, they were excluded from this linguistic revolution. This meant that there was no mass production of typed information at that period of time, as there was no publishing. A non-western language crisis was being faced from 1860 to 1940.

Not only did this hold back the users and speakers of the language in communicational aspects, but they also had to deal with racism. The linguistic differences of Chinese and other latin-based languages was mocked. The western world felt entitled to a sense of superiority at the time because of their technological advancement. Many drawings were created that illustrate the extent of this racism, as seen in the images below.

A racist assumption of what the artist thought a Chinese typwriter looked like in the 1920s (Unknown Artist)
Newspaper drawing mockking the inability of creating a Chinese typwriter at the time ,from the 1920s (Unknown Artist)

Solution

To overcome this linguistic challenge simplifying the Chinese characters was the first step taken. For that, a lot of research was done to find out the most commonly used characters that would later only become around 2500. The placement of all these characters required for them to be non orderly so that the user of this typewriter could effectively type words. By escaping alphabetic order, they managed to then create many styles of tray beds (diagrams for the characters) were produced to lay the characters out physically. Many linguistic logistic issues had to be studied before the creation of the Chinese typewriter

The first Chinese typewriter was mass-produced by the commercial press in Shanghai, a printing establishment setup in 1902 by the Wan brothers. It has Blocks of symbols that were the characters. These characters are movable and were lap laced in specific orders based on the frequency of their use. It was therefore also based on the field that the user was working in. The user of this typewriter has to use a lever that picks up one symbol at a time, moves the letter up to the paper, inks it, marks it, then returns it back to the tray. It also had a magnifying glass, because of the amount and of the small blocks and and extensible tray for the addition of other metal block casts.

A Chinese Typwriter created in 1935
The Chinese Typwriter Tray Bed
A Double Pigeon brand Chinese typewriter, likely a 1970s model
The Double Pigeon Typewriter

Conclusion

The typewriter is now a symbol for innovation, ingenuity, creativity and design brilliance. It represents their the pursuit of a solution.With the Chinese typewriter, there was a constant process of optimisation, and some of the most brilliant and penetrating analysis of human-machine interaction, data structuring.This is a machine whose history is a repository of design inspiration.

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