The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

While typists who wielded Remingtons, Underwoods and IBM Selectrics could churn out texts in English and other Western languages quickly and cheaply, Chinese correspondence remained a time-consuming, laborious affair. But this was changing.

The woman featured in Mullaney’s film was a virtuoso, proficiently memorising unique four-digit codes that allowed her to input different Chinese characters.

Lois Lew

When Chung-Chin Kao unveiled his Chinese typewriter in the 1940s, he needed someone who could operate the machine and demonstrate it to audiences around the world. His choice was Lois Lew, a typist at an IBM plant in Rochester, New York. A capable typist, Lew was able to memorize codes for thousands of characters and quickly master the machine. She was also a beauty, and her face often appeared on the covers of magazines like Zhong-Mei Huabao and IBM promotional brochures.

The IBM Chinese typewriter was an impressive piece of equipment. It consisted of a large rotating drum that was etched with 5400 Chinese characters, letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, and numerals. A keyboard had four banks of numbers that could be used to create different letters, each assigned a four-digit code. Lew’s job was to strike the keys simultaneously in order to form the correct characters, similar to how pianists chord together their pianos to produce a melody.

As an expert on the IBM Chinese typewriter, Lew took on a global tour that included visits to China. She and Kao were greeted by crowds of up to 3,000 people. Coverage of their appearances was plentiful in both American and Chinese publications, and Lew was treated like a celebrity.

But, even with all the excitement, it became clear relatively quickly that Kao’s invention was a failure. He was unable to convince the rest of the world that his coding system for Chinese was practical. In addition, the rise of Mao threw a wrench in Kao’s plans by making it impossible to sell his machine in mainland China.

After leaving IBM, Lew and her husband started a laundromat, which they grew to be successful in. Then, they reinvested their earnings into a Chinese restaurant called Cathay Pagoda in Rochester. It operated for decades and attracted the occasional celebrity, including Katherine Hepburn.

Lew died in October 2023 at age 98 and was survived by her family. She was a remarkable woman, and Mullaney’s book pays tribute to her. It is an important reminder that the development of computer technology is not just a matter of hardware and software, but also a story about users and their embodied experiences with physical objects.

Chung-Chin Kao

While typewriters churned out texts in English and other languages that use Latin characters, Chinese documents remained handwritten. By the early twentieth century, Chinese inventors were trying to change that. They hoped to create a typewriter for the world’s most popular language that would allow people to write more quickly than by hand.

Engineers working on this project faced enormous challenges. The Chinese character set is 70,000-strong, and the keyboard had to accommodate thousands of glyphs. Unlike the alphabetic letters of the English keyboard, the glyphs of Chinese have no obvious order. Moreover, each character requires different strokes to write. Attempts to develop a system that could handle all these characters resulted in complicated machines that were difficult to use.

But despite the difficulties, several inventions made it to the market. These include a model by Kao Chung-chin of New York and a later Chinese typewriter designed by an IBM Rochester engineer.

Kao’s machine was called the Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter, and it featured a five-inch, 5400-character revolving drum. Each of the characters was etched on separate areas of the drum, and the typist used a small number of keys to select them. Despite this impediment, the typist could still reach speeds of 45 WPM. Compared to the speed and ease of typing with predictive technologies on a modern cell phone alphanumeric virtual keyboard, this is a remarkable feat.

This machine was a breakthrough for the Chinese people, and it led to a revolution in communications in China. It also helped the government keep a tight grip on information, since anyone who typed a letter was required to register it with the local bureaucracy. In 1959, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing received a typed letter that humiliated her about her love life and was so distressing she fainted. The writer was quickly identified as a disgruntled Navy lieutenant.

Although the machine never made it to mass production, Kao’s work was a significant milestone. He was awarded two US patents, including a Chinese-language mechanical typewriter USPN 2,412,777A and a stenography machine USPN 2,728,816A. He also invented a meteorological recorder and other electro-mechanical devices.

IBM

The first typewriters that could type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. This was a monumental engineering challenge, as written Chinese is logographic and may have thousands of characters. Unlike Latin-derived alphabets, which only require tens of glyphs, Chinese requires a typist to move the gridded bed left and right with the left hand and punch down on a specific character with the right to make it appear. Two inventors made the first commercially manufactured Chinese typewriters: Zhou Houkun of MIT designed a machine that selected the most used characters; and Qi Xuan of NYU broke up the characters into modular pieces to allow typists to “spell” them.

Kao, the engineer who partnered with IBM to develop the Chinese typewriter, needed a capable typist to demonstrate the device in the United States and China. He approached Lew, who had no formal education but was adept at typing and writing in Chinese.

The early Chinese typewriters were baroque metal monsters. They contained 36 keys divided into four banks, which could produce up to 5,400 Chinese characters. The machines were simultaneously writing devices and incarnations of philosophical debates about how to organize this mysterious and complex language. The machines were a marvel of technology, but they required a typist to master the complexities of its operation.

Thomas Mullaney

A Stanford historian, Guggenheim Fellow and Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress, Mullaney combines a profound understanding of technology with an acuity for human narrative. In The Chinese Typewriter he shows how the battle between alphabetic characters and the more complex Chinese symbols played out over a century, shaping our global information system.

The first Chinese-capable typewriters were invented in the 1920s. Unlike the Latin-based Alphabet, written Chinese is logographic and requires thousands of glyphs to represent words and sounds. This makes a typewriter that can write Chinese far more complex to engineer than one that simply prints letters.

Several systems were tried, and most failed. The models that made it to market, under brands such as Double Pigeon and Seagull, had trays of about 2,500 commonly used characters arranged in a grid. Typists moved a selector lever to hunt for the character they wanted, then pressed a bar that would pick up a specific character and ink it, allowing the typist to strike the key to print the character.

By cutting the distance between characters that were often used together, typists could increase their speed to as high as 80 words per minute. Mullaney suggests that this innovation was crucial in China’s race with the West to control information in the 1940s. He also describes how the Chinese-typewriters helped to shape modern word processing technology by providing a model for how computers might recognize and suggest the most common characters.

A fascinating history, The Chinese Typewriter provides insight into the way that design and engineering can be shaped by cultural, social and economic factors. It also deconstructs the myth that Chinese characters were unsuitable for the single-shift QWERTY keyboard, and gives a vivid sense of how a technology can enlarge and shape culture.

Mullaney’s story of Lois Lew, who confidently operated her improbable, first-of-its-kind machine with aplomb in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai, is compelling and deeply moving. She lived a remarkable life, and Mullaney’s account of her life is an important contribution to the study of China. His book also shines a light on the many kinds of Chinese people who became typewriter virtuosos, including women.