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Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century.<ref>{{cite book|title=William Austin Burt's Typographer |year=1829 |publisher=Science Museum}}</ref> However, as the [[Chinese languages]] use a common [[logographic]] [[writing system]], fitting thousands of [[Chinese characters]] on the machine needed much more complex engineering than typewriters using a simple [[latin alphabet]], or other non-logographic scripts. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 Chinese characters.<ref name=cs>{{citation|title=Chinaman Invents Chinese Typewriter Using 4,000 Characters|first=unknown |last=unknown |publisher=The New York Times |url=http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9503E0D8153BE233A25750C2A9619C946796D6CF |date=July 23, 1916}}</ref> Chinese typewriters, and similar [[Japanese typewriter|Japanese typewriters]] invented by [[Kyota Sugimoto]], which use [[kanji]] adopted from the Chinese writing system, started to appear only in the early 20th century.
Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century.<ref>{{cite book|title=William Austin Burt's Typographer |year=1829 |publisher=Science Museum}}</ref> However, as the [[Chinese languages]] use a common [[logographic]] [[writing system]], fitting thousands of [[Chinese characters]] on the machine needed much more complex engineering than typewriters using a simple [[latin alphabet]], or other non-logographic scripts. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 Chinese characters.<ref name=cs>{{citation|title=Chinaman Invents Chinese Typewriter Using 4,000 Characters|first=unknown |last=unknown |publisher=The New York Times |url=http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9503E0D8153BE233A25750C2A9619C946796D6CF |date=July 23, 1916}}</ref> Chinese typewriters, and similar [[Japanese typewriter|Japanese typewriters]] invented by [[Kyota Sugimoto]], which use [[kanji]] adopted from the Chinese writing system, started to appear only in the early 20th century.<ref>{{Cite web |title=On This Day in Typewriter History: Sugimoto's Japanese Typewriter. |author=R Messenger |date=Nov 9, 2012 |accessdate=January 27, 2014 |url=http://oztypewriter.blogspot.de/2012/11/on-this-day-in-typewriter-history_3290.html |work=Australian Typewriter Museum}}</ref>


== Hou-Kun Chow typewriter ==
== Hou-Kun Chow typewriter ==

Revision as of 12:29, 26 September 2014

Template:Chinesetext Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century.[1] However, as the Chinese languages use a common logographic writing system, fitting thousands of Chinese characters on the machine needed much more complex engineering than typewriters using a simple latin alphabet, or other non-logographic scripts. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 Chinese characters.[2] Chinese typewriters, and similar Japanese typewriters invented by Kyota Sugimoto, which use kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system, started to appear only in the early 20th century.[3]

Hou-Kun Chow typewriter

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9503E0D8153BE233A25750C2A9619C946796D6CF

See also: Typewriter § History
Hou-Kun Chow, inventor of an early Chinese typewriter.
A mechanical Chinese typewriter. The characters can be assorted on the board and can be picked separately and then typed.

Hou-Kun Chow (Chinese: 周厚坤), a mechanical engineer in Shanghai, invented a typewriter utilising 4,000 characters in 1916. He had studied in the United States like several other Chinese who also contributed to the development of the Chinese typewriters.[2]<needref!> Hou-Kun first thought about practicality of a Chinese typewriter in Boston, while he was inspecting American typewriters as a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His efforts were initially hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai.[2]

This type of a mechanical typewriter used a revolving cylinder to fit Chinese characters on the machine. Hou-Kun considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for the Chinese characters. They were ordered by radicals and number of strokes on the cylinder, in a manner similar to Chinese dictionaries.[2]

Hou-Kun expected his typewriter to be used in Chinese offices where multiple copies of documents would be required to be made, and by Chinese living in foreign countries due to their lack of access to the services of skilled writers familiar with Chinese characters.[2]

Ming Kwai typewriter

File:MINGKWAI.jpg
Ming Kwai Typewriter

The Ming Kwai typewriter is an electromechanical typewriter invented and patented by Dr. Lin Yutang. The patent, No. 2613795, was filed on April 17, 1946 by Lin, and was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 14, 1952. One of Lin's intentions was to help modernize China. Lin called his design the "Ming Kwai" typewriter and promoted it as "The Only Chinese Typewriter Designed for Everybody's Use". The two Chinese characters "Ming kwai" (Chinese: 明快; pinyin: míngkuài; Wade–Giles: ming-k'uai) means "clear" (as in understandable) and "quick".

Lin had a prototype machine custom built by the Carl E. Krum Company, a small engineering-design consulting firm with an office in New York City. That multilingual typewriter was the size of a conventional office typewriter of the 1940s. It measured 36 × 46 × 23 cm (14" x 18" x 9"). The typefaces fit on a drum. A "magic eye" was mounted in the center of the keyboard which magnifies and allows the typist to review a selected character.[2] Characters are selected by first pressing two keys to choose a desired character which is arranged according to a system Lin devised for his dictionary of the Chinese language. The selected Chinese character appeared in the magic eye for preview,[2] the typist then pressed a "master" key, similar to today's computer function key. The typewriter could create 90,000 distinct characters using either one or two of six character-containing rollers, which in combination has 7000 full characters and 1,400 character radicals or partial characters.[2]

The inspired aspect of the typewriter was the system Lin devised for a Chinese script. It had thirty geometric shapes or strokes (somewhat analogous to the elements of a glyph). These became "letters" by which to alphabetize Chinese characters. He broke tradition with the long-standing system of radicals and stroke order writing and categorizing of Chinese characters, inventing a new way of seeing and categorizing.

The typewriter was not produced commercially. According to Lin's daughter, Lin Tai-Yi, the day she was to demonstrate the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company, they could not make it work. Although they did get the machine fixed for a press conference the next day, it was to no avail. Lin found himself deeply in debt. In 1947, Lin paid income taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service and went to work in Paris for UNESCO.

Stone typewriter

In the midst of the economic reforms of the 1980s, both the need and the opportunity to create a modern Chinese typewriter became apparent. Old and inefficient mechanical typewriters were still in use although China's industries were modernizing. In the mid-1980s, it became possible for the Chinese to establish small private businesses called Township and Village Enterprises. At the time, this business model was effectively the only way that a private domestic company could operate in China.[4] Engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners took advantage of the new legislation to form their IT company Stone Emerging Industries Company (Chinese: Sitong xinxing chanye gongsi) in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".[5] Although described with various terms of "people-run enterprise" by officials, there was no legal category that would correspond to it. Wan and his partners had to operate the company as a "red hat capitalist" firm which was formally a collective enterprise but in reality pursued private profit and expansion into new markets.[5]

The Stone company became interested in solving the problem of combining Chinese characters with modern electronic text input when Wang Jizhi, who had worked in the field for the government, joined the company. He met Japanese executives from Mitsui at a trade show for foreign electronics. Wang succeeded in securing a deal for developing a software to allow a Brother Industries dot matrix printer, distributed by Mitsui, to print Chinese characters.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). The success of their printer software lead Stone and Mitsui to cooperate again in 1985 to develop and market an electric typewriter or word processor: the MS-2400.<755> The improved MS-2401 could type 200 characters per minute making it perform equally well as an IBM personal computer. The typewriters could print in both English and Chinese.[6] Stone became one of the most successful IT companies in China and remained the dominant producer of Chinese word processors until the mid-1990s. <756>

Impact of the Chinese typewriter

Faxes did not partially take over the functions of the slower typewriters or computers in China for writing, in the same scale as in Japan.

The Chinese typewriter is a common theme in popular culture.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ William Austin Burt's Typographer. Science Museum. 1829.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h unknown, unknown (July 23, 1916), Chinaman Invents Chinese Typewriter Using 4,000 Characters, The New York Times Cite error: The named reference "cs" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  3. ^ R Messenger (Nov 9, 2012). "On This Day in Typewriter History: Sugimoto's Japanese Typewriter". Australian Typewriter Museum. Retrieved January 27, 2014.
  4. ^ deng2
  5. ^ a b art
  6. ^ Dorothy J. Solinger (1 January 1993). China's Transition from Socialism: Statist Legacies and Market Reforms, 1980-1990. M.E. Sharpe. pp. 266–. ISBN 978-1-56324-068-3.

References

  • Bliven, Bruce Jr. The Wonderful Writing Machine. New York: Random House, 1954.
  • Chinese Typewriter: A Real Character Study", Business Week (August 30, 1947), p. 16.
  • Lin, Tai-Yi. "My Father, Lin Yutang", Reader's Digest (December 1990) p:161-191.
  • Lin, Yutang, Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1972.
  • Tsu, Jing. "Lin Yutang's Typewriter." In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 49-79.

Category:Chinese orthography Category:Han character input Category:Text Category:Typewriters

ref

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