The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

For decades, images of Chinese typewriters conjured up a mix of fascination and humor. From turn-of-the-century cartoons to MC Hammer’s frenetic dance moves to Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons, these baroque metal monsters seemed to be both writing machines and incarnations of philosophies about how characters should be arranged.

But real Chinese typewriters looked nothing like these imaginary ones. They were much smaller and used fewer keys.

Lois Lew

The early Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine, not something that anyone could operate with the aplomb displayed in Fast Company’s recently published feature on typist Lois Lew. For those unfamiliar, the hulking, gunmetal gray instrument resembled a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press, with thousands of little metal characters arranged on a rotating drum. Each one corresponded to a four-digit code, and the operator had to remember all of them.

Kao, the inventor of this early machine from New York City, needed a Chinese-speaking typist to demonstrate his invention at a series of appearances in both the United States and China. He was initially impressed with Grace Tong, a typist who worked for an IBM customer, but when Tong fell ill and was unable to continue the tour, Kao turned to Lew, a solitary woman working at an IBM plant in Rochester, New York.

Lew had no formal education, but she was fluent in Chinese and a quick study. She spent a week holed up in her hotel room memorizing all the four-key codes, and then she and Kao set off around the world on a tour that saw her typing in front of crowds as large as 3,000 people.

The machines were a big hit, but even bigger was the publicity they generated. The stories appeared in Science, Signs of the Times, Municipal Affairs Weekly, and many other outlets. Lew became a household name, appearing in promotional posters and the 1947 film Zhong-Mei Huabao, and her face was plastered across the covers of IBM brochures and newsmagazines.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to save the Chinese typewriter from a surprisingly quick demise. As the Cold War raged and Mao’s revolution took hold, Kao was forced to withdraw his machine from the market in the United States and China, and the project died a quick death.

Lois Lew, now 96 years old, still remembers a few of those four-digit codes, but she left the machine business behind long ago. After leaving IBM, she and her husband started a laundromat, and they used their earnings to open Cathay Pagoda, a popular Chinese restaurant in Rochester that lasted until 2007 and attracted the likes of Katherine Hepburn.

Chung-Chin Kao

While Kao’s device was not the first Chinese typewriter, it was by far the most commercially successful. Kao, who was also a skilled businesswoman, worked closely with American engineers to design and patent his machine. The company that produced it, Commercial Press, dedicated significant resources to promoting the Chinese typewriter on a tour of present-day Southeast Asia and at the 1926 World’s Fair in Philadelphia.

Unlike the Latin alphabet, which requires only a few characters, written Chinese employs thousands of glyphs. Engineers had to develop a more complex machine than the traditional alphabet-based typewriter to accommodate this new writing system. Typewriters that could print Chinese characters began to appear in the 1920s, with the first mass-produced models available in the early 1930s.

To operate the device, typists sat at a table and used their left hand to move a tray bed of Chinese character symbols to the right or the left. With their right hand, they moved a mechanical arm over the desired symbol and then pressed a type lever (see source: Chinese Typewriter). This caused a vertical rod inside the machine to swing up rapidly and strike the Chinese character slug against a paper ribbon that held it. The slug then fell back to its original position and the typist continued typing.

The typists who operated these machines had to be highly skilled. They needed to memorize the characters and their strokes, as well as the order of the symbols in which they appeared on the tray bed. Additionally, the Chinese typewriter did not have a feature that allowed users to check their work before committing ink to paper—like today’s Chinese Input Method Editor systems, which provide a “pop-up menu” for each word or character as it is entered. This lack of feedback exacerbated the already demanding tasks that typists faced.

The typists who worked on these devices were predominantly lower- and middle-class women who trained at typing institutes. Often, they would work for banks, government offices, universities, and other private businesses, with some even going on to open their own typing shops. These independent typing operations were controversial, as they undermined the authority of the state. They also increased the burden on typists, who had to juggle multiple jobs and compete with each other for work.

Thomas Mullaney

Thomas Mullaney has been studying Chinese typewriters since he found one in the attic of his family’s apartment building. He’s now a professor of history and East Asian studies at Stanford University, a Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, a Guggenheim Fellow, and author of multiple books including The Chinese Typewriter, which won the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History.

He explains how the invention of the typewriter allowed Chinese typists to experiment with new arrangements for their characters in order to increase typing speeds. This arrangement was called ‘radiating style’ or lianxiang in Chinese, and typists were able to triple their speed after using this system. The resulting efficiency enabled them to compose the nationally circulated reform-era literary journal Today! which appeared in November 1953. The journal celebrated typist Shen Yunfen, who was declared a ‘First-Class Hero’ and ‘Model Typist’ by the Communist Party leadership.

In the early 20th century, two inventors vied to solve the information technology and engineering puzzle of creating a Chinese language typewriter. Zhou Houkun of MIT designed a machine that focused on common usage Chinese, selecting the 3,000 most used everyday characters; while Qi Xuan of NYU broke characters into modular parts to allow typists to spell any character. Zhou’s device was adopted by Commercial Press in Shanghai, and improved by Shu Zhendong to become China’s first mass-manufactured Chinese typewriter.

After 1949, Chinese typewriters were used more than ever before and could be found in offices, universities, and businesses across the country. The Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter (pictured above) became the standard, with its moveable tray holding nearly 2,500 interchangeable characters. Typists learned to navigate the new machines by practicing repetitive drills, starting with common two-character words like’student’ and ‘because’ that helped them familiarize themselves with, if not the exact x-y coordinates of each character, then at least the general locations of the most frequently used ones.

While the invention of the Chinese typewriter enabled a new level of writing speed, there was still much work to be done to improve the ease with which people wrote in Chinese. From turn-of-the-century cartoons to MC Hammer’s ‘Chinese Typewriter’ dance, and from Wang Xiaoshuai’s radical alphabet to the pronunciation-led systems that billions now use to type in Chinese, a staggering amount of time, energy, and cleverness was poured into making Chinese characters easier for both machines and humans to manipulate.

The Chinese Typewriter

When people think of a Chinese typewriter, it’s easy to picture a massive machine with thousands of keys. Indeed, this is the image that has been conjured up by everything from turn-of-the-century cartoons mocking Chinese typewriters to MC Hammer’s dance moves to Maoist propaganda posters. But that’s not how things really looked. Real Chinese typewriters were far smaller and simpler than often thought, and they hardly even had keyboards at all.

Instead, typists used a large tray of loose metal glyphs, ranging from dots to lines to characters, which they could assort by hand to pick out one at a time. Then they pushed a lever that picked up the character and moved it up to the paper, inked it, marked it, and returned it to the tray. Repeating this process for each character produced a line of text. Typists could produce up to 20-30 characters a minute this way, and the resulting mimeograph prints were crisp and legible.

The first attempts to mechanize Chinese writing date back to the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that two inventors developed commercially manufactured machines that worked. Zhou Houkun of MIT created a system that selected the most common characters for everyday use; Qi Xuan of NYU broke each character into modular pieces that allowed typists to “spell” them. Eventually, Zhou’s design was adopted by Commercial Press in Shanghai and improved upon by Shu Zhendong to create the country’s first mass-manufactured Chinese typewriter.

Mullaney argues that these Chinese typewriters enabled the development of predictive typing—and, in turn, modern word processing software. Today, we almost never realize that we are using ancient technology: Every second of every day, we’re tapping into the same predictive technologies to input our clumsy alphanumeric characters on cumbersome cell phone virtual keyboards.

But the history of the Chinese typewriter is also a story of political power and bureaucratic inertia. During the height of Maoist rule, typewriters were forbidden objects to own—and as a result, they became controlled and heavily policed. But some typists found ways to circumvent these controls, and unofficial typing shops (dazi tengxieshe) emerged where typists would work together and share a single typewriter, allowing them to type and print high volumes of Reform Era literary journals such as Today!