The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

From baroque metal monsters with cylinders and wheels to predictive text on your cell phone, these technologies live on in surprising ways. But they grew out of the same old problem: how to fit tens of thousands of characters onto a user-friendly device.

Fortunately, an improbable woman figured it out. Thomas Mullaney and Cindy Tsu tell her story.

Lois Lew

A lot of people can type with aplomb—telegraph operators, emergency responders, court stenographers, police officers and grocery store clerks. But Lew was a virtuoso of a very different kind. She confidently operated a highly complex, first-of-its-kind Chinese typewriter in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai.

When the machine was unveiled in 1940, inventor Kao Chung-Chin needed typists to demonstrate it, both in the United States and in China. He had already scoured the country for candidates, and he found Lois Lew in Rochester. Lew, a wife and mother who wore her hair in braids, had no traditional formal education. But he knew he needed her. He pushed her to the head of the line at his demonstrations, and she made the machine look effortless.

The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable beast, not something that could be easily mastered by just anyone. The gunmetal gray machine, which resembled a cross between a deli meat slicer and a small printing press, had 36 keys divided into four groups. Each key corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, along with punctuation marks and numerals. The operator had to know the codes in order to transcribe Chinese passages onto a revolving drum, which would then translate them into their corresponding characters on the paper.

Each character on the drum corresponded to a four-digit code. Lew had to memorize the codes, and she had to be able to put them into the machine quickly, precisely, and without error. This required an extraordinary memory, as well as a remarkable ability to think in four digits at a time.

But despite her stellar performance, Lew’s efforts ultimately fell short. Amid the geopolitical chaos of World War II, it became clear that Kao’s coding system wouldn’t work in the wider world. And he was unable to convince the Chinese government that his machine was practical, either.

More than 70 years later, Lew—now 95 and living in Rochester—is still telling her story. Thomas Mullaney—who has written a book on the development of the Chinese typewriter and its implications for communications—has interviewed her extensively, and his resulting profile for Fast Company is nothing less than breathtaking.

The Story of a Chinese Typewriter

When the last Chinese typewriter rolled off the assembly line in 1991, it was a moment of both joy and dread. The machines were being replaced by new technologies, most notably word processors and computers, but the challenges they presented—and the innovations they spawned—would live on. For example, typists’ techniques for “predicting” text helped give rise to the world’s second largest PC manufacturer, the Chinese firm Lianxiang (or Lenovo), while ‘typed-and-mimeographed’ books and journals continued to be produced well into the post-Mao era.

Thomas Mullaney, Professor of East Asian Language and Cultures at Stanford University, is an expert on the Chinese typewriter. He has collected 12 machines—four times as many as China’s only typewriter museum, in Shanghai—and lectures about them to groups around the Bay Area. His book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, tells this remarkable story.

Mullaney’s sweeping narrative starts with the idea of a Chinese typewriter as an object of skepticism, ridicule and scorn throughout the nineteenth century. In the eyes of Westerners, he writes, the characters of Chinese were ‘unfit for modern machinery and were widely perceived as a sign of China’s backwardness.

In the early twentieth century, a group of young Chinese men, including Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan, who had studied at Ivy League universities, began to experiment with different ways to disseminate information using new technology. They created a machine that broke characters into their components and then assembled them as needed, bypassing the need for thousands of keys. One such design, known as the ‘divisible type’ machine, was built in 1915.

By the Maoist era, a virtually never-ending series of mass mobilization campaigns placed an unprecedented burden on Chinese typists. Typists would prepare new materials for study sessions at work units and other places nationwide each week, but there was a limit on how many copies could be produced at a time, since printing presses were expensive and required a large amount of preparation.

This limitation meant that typists had to learn how to type faster. In order to do so, they engaged in a practice called “repetition drills,” whereby they repeated common two-character words over and over, learning the general locations of the characters on the tray bed—if not the exact x-y coordinates, then at least the geometric patterns that tended to go together.

The Story of a Typist

The story of Chinese typewriters is a fascinating tale of experiment, prototype and failure in the century-long quest to solve an impossible-seeming design problem: How do you fit thousands of characters on a desktop device? But it is also a story of ingenuity and survival. Stanford professor Tom Mullaney has spent the past five years researching and writing a book on the subject, Chinese Typewriter: A History. He recently spoke about the book at a lecture series hosted by Google in Silicon Valley.

In the 1930s and 1940s, typists were required to crank out massive quantities of work during the Chinese Civil War and its political campaigns. To handle this enormous workload, many typists began to experiment with a variety of ways to arrange the characters on their typewriter tray beds, so that the most frequently used character were near each other (this is a diagram explaining the principle). Typists also tried new taxonomic methods, breaking the characters down into their radicals and strokes in order to speed up typing by allowing typists to more easily identify the characters they needed.

Lew was one of these typists. When Chung-Chin Kao, the inventor of the Chinese typewriter, was looking for a woman to use his machine in the United States and China, Lew emerged as a leading candidate because she was one of the only typists at her job who could read and write in both English and Chinese.

Even so, the machine wasn’t easy to navigate. Early models had a sea of individual character slugs on a rectangular tray that typists would have to “hunt and peck” in order to locate the desired symbol, which a mechanical arm would then bang against paper. Typists learned how to navigate this sea of symbols through repetitive drills, such as repeatedly typing two-character combinations like’student’ (xue xue and sheng sheng) and ‘because’ (yin yin and wei wei). These drills imprinted on typists a kind of muscle memory that helped them remember, if not the exact x-y coordinates of each character, then at least their general locations on the tray bed.

The Story of a Machine

When most Westerners think of a Chinese typewriter, they imagine a keyboard with thousands of keys. That image is partly why the machines have endured such a strange legacy in popular culture. They’ve appeared in turn-of-the-century cartoons, MC Hammer dances and The Simpsons, among other places. Even so, real Chinese typewriters looked very different from what we tend to imagine.

First of all, they were much smaller than their imagined counterparts. They also had far fewer keys. Unlike the QWERTY keyboards that most of us now use to type, which contain an alphabetical key for every letter of the alphabet and a number key, Chinese typewriters had only 72 keystrokes—two sets, upper and lower, that held constituent parts of characters, along with eight numbers.

The result was a machine that was both difficult to operate and highly cumbersome. Typists had to use a method of hunt-and-peck in order to select the desired character from the many available options. This meant that a typist had to spend a great deal of time practicing, memorizing the locations of hundreds of characters and learning which ones went together.

But despite the difficulties, the machine became a vital tool for Chinese writers in the post-Mao period. Journals like the nationally circulated reform era literary magazine Today! were typed and mimeographed on Chinese typewriters, often by women. Even the bureaucracy was able to use them, with government offices and factories typing up reports on their Catholic communities.

Ultimately, the legacy of the Chinese typewriter was in the puzzle it represented—how to fit a writing system with tens of thousands of characters into a compact, easy-to-use device. This challenge has resurfaced over and over again, from the early days of word processing to the development of Chinese keyboards for computers, and most recently in the design of text input systems on smartphones and tablets. In each instance, engineers and designers have taken many of their cues from the lessons learned by typists who struggled with Chinese typewriters. That’s why Mullaney feels it is so important to document these machines and the methods they exemplified.