A decade ago I posted about Chinese typewriters; now I’m happy to pass along Thomas S. Mullaney’s Fast Company article about the woman who helped demonstrate and publicize IBM’s 1947 electric Chinese typewriter, invented by Kao Chung-Chin. Yes, you read that right, 1947. Mullaney tells a riveting tale about how he contacted Lew and got her life story (which is in itself an amazing trajectory) and about how the thing worked (you can see a clip of it in action); I’ll just quote this paragraph about the outcome of the team’s initially triumphal visit to China:
In the end, however, it was geopolitics that would kill Kao’s project. “The Communist takeover in China was well underway at the time,” a 1964 retrospective article explained, “and was completed before the typewriter had a chance to achieve significant sales in an understandably nervous Chinese market.” Not only did Mao’s victory in mainland China push IBM’s anxieties to the breaking point, it also threw Kao’s national identity into turmoil. He became a man without a country, being issued a special Diplomatic “Red” Visa by the United States. The IBM Chinese Typewriter never made it to market, leaving the challenge of electrifying—and eventually computerizing—the Chinese language to later inventors in the second half of the twentieth-century (a topic I’ve written about elsewhere, including in a forthcoming book on MIT Press called, unsurprisingly enough, The Chinese Computer).
Thanks, Bathrobe!
This coding approach pre-dated ASCII, so possibly the inventor was inspired by telegraph codes, some of which used numbers in a similar fashion.
Those Hat readers who are also part-time masochists can approximate the IBM 1947 Chinese Typewriter experience using the Microsoft Character Map. Back in the day, I had about 30 of these codes memorized and I thought very highly of myself.
This coding approach pre-dated ASCII, so possibly the inventor was inspired by telegraph codes, some of which used numbers in a similar fashion.
What occurred to me was Mathews’ dictionary, which identifies the characters with numbers from 1 (A ‘initial particle’) to 7773 (YÜN ‘hippuris or mare’s tail’).
I have seen old fashioned Chinese typesetting at work. I am not at all sure of the numbers, but there were something like 7 30×30 trays, and the typesetter found the desired character and used a sort of tongs to pick it up and put it in place. It struck me as incredibly demanding for what I suspect wasn’t a well paying or prestigious job.
The Rochester area is apparently chock-full of Chinese-American ladies who did interesting and newsworthy things in their younger years before becoming pillar-of-the-community business owners. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/lifestyle/2017/01/21/chi-wah-soo-breaks-her-silence-davie-bowie-arrest/96306624/