The Woman Who Mastered a Chinese Typewriter

Since they first went on sale in the 1940s, Chinese typewriters have been the subject of curiosity, confusion and ridicule. In a recent article, Stanford University professor Thomas Mullaney profiles the improbable woman who mastered them.

She did so by memorizing thousands of four-digit codes that mapped to characters, and mastering a machine built for people with little experience typing in Chinese. It was an incredible feat of human-machine co-construction.

Lew’s Story

At the time, a Chinese typewriter was something of an object of wonder. It was a complex device that featured countless buttons covered in complicated-looking characters, and it allowed users to type in a language that did not use an alphabet. For more than a century, it was the only way for millions of Chinese to produce business and government documents. The machine was a powerful symbol of modernity and power, but it was also a nightmare to operate for typists who had never seen such a beast.

The woman who chinese typewriter was Lois Lew, an immigrant from China who had spent her early years in poverty and political turmoil, moving from place to place with relative ease but always a step behind the next big opportunity. Lew knew that her ability to operate the IBM Chinese typewriter would determine her future, and the future of her family.

Kao had enlisted her to demonstrate the prototype to incredulous journalists and potential buyers. He needed her to convince the world that his machine was a viable option, and to demonstrate the coding system upon which it relied. She was his last best hope.

For 150 years, engineers and linguists in both China and the West had struggled to mechanize the vast number of Chinese characters, or hanzi. For the millions of Chinese who worked in government and business, a successful solution would mean enormous increases in productivity. But the task was daunting and, at times, dangerous.

A hulking machine of gunmetal gray, the IBM Chinese typewriter held 36 keys, a formidable array for any typist to navigate. The keyboard was divided into four banks, with the digits 0 through 9 appearing in each. The resulting characters could be assembled in nearly infinite ways, a far cry from the simple letters that populate our alphabetic keyboards today.

The harrowing history of the Chinese typewriter illustrates how an invention can have immense, yet delayed, impact. It was not until 1970 that the work of Chinese engineers finally paid off with a remarkably sophisticated, computer-like keyboard known as IME. It was the precursor to today’s smart, omnipresent keyboards that can translate dozens of languages and allow computers to interact with their users in their native language.

Chung-Chin Kao

In the 1940s, Chinese American engineer Chung-Chin Kao teamed with IBM to build the world’s first electric typewriter that could handle Chinese characters. As a logographic writing system, Chinese requires thousands of different symbols, making such a machine much more complex to design than an alphabet-based model.

The resulting product looked something like a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press. To create a letter, the operator would hit a series of four numeric keys, more or less simultaneously (as described at the time, this was a bit like playing a chord on a piano). This digit code indicated the location of the desired character on a metal drum revolving inside the gun-metal gray chassis. The machine would then print out the character by depressing another key.

Kao needed a skilled typist to demonstrate the machine on domestic and international tours. His initial candidate, Grace Tong, was not the ideal choice: She lacked the technical aptitude to operate the machine, and her personal life made it difficult for her to accompany Kao on his travels. For reasons unexplained in archival records, she dropped out of the picture.

That’s when Lew came on the scene. The story of her ascension to fame as a “Chinese typewriter girl” caught the attention of national and local media, including such publications as Science, Signs of the Times, Municipal Affairs Weekly, and Science Pictorial. Publishers were enamoured with Lew: Her face soon appeared on IBM promotional brochures and in a 1947 film.

Despite the overwhelmingly positive coverage, Lew’s demonstrations were not as successful as Kao had hoped. In part, this was due to geopolitics: The Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 made many companies and agencies wary of entering the country, and threw Kao’s own sense of identity into turmoil (he was granted a special red-carpet Diplomatic Visa by the US government).

But even more than that, it was Lew’s lack of formal education that hampered her ability to master the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese typing system. Her inability to spell and read a wide range of Chinese-language materials made it challenging to produce letters with the proper meanings—which was critical for her job as a typist.

IBM’s Chinese Typewriter

For more than a century, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity and confusion — and even ridicule. They’re mammoth, impractical, breathtaking. A real-life machine from the 1940s would display a rotating drum with 5400 of the most common characters, each of which had to be struck simultaneously like piano keys. In the end, it was a monumental task that only a handful of people were capable of mastering, and one of them was the improbable Lois Lew.

A Stanford University professor, Thomas Mullaney, has written a fascinating book about the machines and the century-long struggle to make them work. He recently published a piece in Fast Company about the typist, describing how she mastered a machine that was capable of producing only 36 of the thousands of most common characters, but which she nonetheless made workable.

The premise of the book is that if you can sort a syllable-based language into letters, then you can make an alphabetic keyboard and write anything on it. It’s a notion that has pervaded the history of information technology, from telegraphy to computers. It’s the presumption of alphabetic universalism that underpinned such projects as Remington and Olivetti typewriters, and the creation of systems such as punch cards and word processing.

Until recently, no one had successfully adapted a typewriter to Chinese, though a few individuals had come close. A real Chinese typewriter could not be built until an inventor figured out how to deal with the difference between syllable-based and letter-based writing systems.

Mullaney’s book explores the tinkerers and inventors who tried to solve this engineering puzzle for decades. The solutions they came up with, he suggests, might have important implications for the world of computing and communications today.

The digitized version of the 1940s-era film about Lois Lew and her IBM Chinese typewriter can be seen here. It’s an amazing film to watch, especially for anyone who has ever attempted to use a Chinese keyboard. A full transcript is also available, and the movie is part of a larger collection of films rescued from archives by the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

Lois Lew

There are plenty of professionals who memorize a wide variety of special codes in the course of their work: telegraph operators, emergency responders, court stenographers. But no one did so as confidently and expertly as Lois Lew. A typist who became the world’s master of the first-of-its-kind IBM Chinese typewriter, Lew was able to translate and memorize codes as fast as she could type.

In 1947, the year the typewriter was introduced to the public, Lew departed from her life in Troy, New York and took a ship across the ocean to Shanghai. There, she reunited with her husband and was ushered into a suite in the Park Hotel, then the tallest building in Asia. She was surrounded by scientists, local government officials and newsmen. It was a dream come true, but Lew knew there was more to the journey than just glamour.

Kao needed her to demonstrate the machine and win over incredulous journalists, editors and buyers as to the feasibility of his coding system. Lew’s job was to transcribe articles and Chinese passages from the newspapers, convert them into four-digit codes and type them into the machine efficiently, without messing up, each time. She had a week to prepare, and it was up to her to make the whole thing look effortless.

It was a daunting task, but Lew’s practice paid off. She soon became a key member of the team, along with a woman named Gay who was serving as Kao’s translator. Together, the pair made a remarkable impression in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai.

The reception in China was even more ecstatic, and the city’s mayor even invited them to his home for dinner. But the joy was short-lived. A few weeks later, Gay was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and she had to be sent back to the US.

When Lew returned to Rochester, she was a changed woman. She and her husband opened a laundromat and reinvested their savings, including some of her IBM earnings, into the launch of Cathay Pagoda, a popular Chinese restaurant that was open from 1968 to 2007. Now in her 90s, Lew continues to live independently, swims at the YMCA for three hours a week and keeps photos of former guests, including Katharine Hepburn, near her cash register.