The Woman Who Invented the Chinese Typewriter

The Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine. It could lay down 5,400 characters, wielding a language infinitely more complicated to mechanize than English.

Yet when it was first demonstrated in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai, a woman named Lois Lew confidently operated it with grace and composure. The improbable story of this typist and the machines she mastered is both fascinating and instructive.

Lois Lew

When the IBM Chinese typewriter debuted to the world in the 1940’s, inventor Kao Chung-Chin needed someone who could help him demonstrate the machine’s capabilities on a worldwide tour. He picked Lois Lew, an IBM plant worker from Rochester who had a high school education and was capable of translating and memorizing codes. She would be the only one capable of convincing an audience that his coding system was viable.

As Thomas Mullaney explains in a recent Stanford University blog post, the machine had just four banks of keys that were arranged into groups of one, three, and five that were mashed together like piano chords to produce a single character. Each character was assigned a four-digit code that corresponded to a spot on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Each of the four characters spelled out a specific word in Chinese. The machine’s ingenious system allowed the user to type Chinese words with a minimum of keystrokes and without looking at the keyboard.

Lew had a knack for the machine and quickly mastered its complex operation. She was soon featured in a series of articles and promotional brochures that were accompanied by photographs of her. Publishers were so enamored with her that they even included a 1947 film of her demonstrating the typewriter in China.

While the IBM Chinese typewriter was a revolutionary invention, it wasn’t a financial success. As a result, Lew left the company in 1948 to start her own laundromat, which she and her sister Gay operated until their deaths in 1968. She also reinvested her IBM earnings as well as her personal savings into Cathay Pagoda, a popular Rochester Chinese restaurant that served celebrities and local dignitaries.

In the end, it was geopolitics that would kill the Chinese typewriter. The Communist takeover of mainland China was already underway by that time, and pushed IBM’s anxieties to their limit. Ultimately, the project died before it had a chance to achieve significant sales in an understandably nervous market. Lew herself lived to be 95 years old and still recalled the story of her remarkable career.

Thomas Mullaney

Thomas Mullaney is a Stanford professor of history and a Guggenheim fellow. He is the author of The Chinese Typewriter and a forthcoming book on Chinese-language computing. His work explores the relationship between language, technology, and power. He has been interviewed on RadioLab, and speaks frequently at tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

The Chinese Typewriter is a fascinating story of the invention of the first mechanical typewriter capable of typing Chinese characters. It tells the story of Lin Yutang, a Chinese inventor who was determined to create a machine that could produce a vast array of Chinese characters on a page. It also explores the technological challenges of developing a Chinese-language typewriter.

The book begins in 1913, when Lin Yutang was a student at the Beijing Normal College. He was inspired by the emergence of Western alphabetic typewriters and began to contemplate creating one for the Chinese language. He was soon joined by other students, including Chen Yinhua and Zhou Houkun. The three of them began to work on a prototype in 1914, which they called the Mingkwai. The Mingkwai was an odd-looking machine, with 36 keys divided into four groups. Each key had two or three symbols, and the impressions produced on paper would bear no direct, one-to-one correspondence with any of the symbols depressed.

Despite its formidable size and complexity, the Mingkwai was a remarkable achievement, and it paved the way for subsequent generations of Chinese-language typewriters. However, the Mingkwai was not perfect, and it was ultimately overtaken by more advanced computer input methods.

By 1959, when Mao Zedong took power in China, the Mingkwai had fallen out of favor with government bureaucrats. Mao had instituted rules that banned the private use of Chinese characters, and this was a major reason for the typewriter’s decline.

Today, few people use a Chinese typewriter. Most of us now communicate using text, voice, or video. But the Chinese typewriter is still a fascinating example of the relationship between technology and language. It shows how the ascendance of Western alphabetic languages in telecommunications led to the subjugation of character-based scripts.

The Story of the Chinese Typewriter

For over a century, the Chinese typewriter was an object of curiosity and confusion—and a fair amount of ridicule. In turn-of-the-century cartoons, the device appeared to be a massive machine with thousands of keys emblazoned with complicated-looking characters. On “The Simpsons,” smarty-pants Lisa was confounded by one, too. And MC Hammer’s frenetic dance routines were meant to evoke the flailing that a typist would have had to do while trying to maneuver a giant keyboard.

But real Chinese typewriters looked nothing like this. The device was actually much smaller than its imposing image implies. And while it did feature a keyboard, it didn’t have thousands of keys. Instead, it used a rectangular tray that held little metal characters. Typists could then move the tray to locate a character, which the mechanism then struck against a ribbon to form a letter.

The history of the Chinese typewriter is a fascinating one, and one that offers a glimpse into the complex relationship between language and technology. As Thomas Mullaney demonstrates in his new book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, the machine’s development is also a window into the larger story of how Western alphabetic languages displaced character-based scripts as the dominant mode of communication.

Inventors from all over the world wrestled with how to fit a huge number of Chinese characters onto a desktop device, and the stakes were high. For the millions of Chinese who worked in offices producing government and business documents, improved typing speeds would mean enormous productivity gains. And for the rest of the world, the ability to read Chinese would be a crucial bridge to understanding China and its people.

Mullaney traces the development of the Chinese typewriter through a series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes. His book is the first to offer a global history of the machine, and it’s a fascinating read.

Final Words

Whenever you hear about the Chinese typewriter, it’s easy to think of it as a funny thing that turns up in cartoons or even MC Hammer videos [see: cartoon mocking the Chinese typewriter]. But in fact, these machines were formidable. The hulking gunsmetal-gray machines required 36 keys to produce all 5,400 characters of the Chinese language—a language without an alphabet, so all the myriad ideograms must be represented by individual letters.

It was a task that was not easily accomplished, as the technology editor of Fast Company, Thomas Mullaney, points out in an article about Lois Lew. But she mastered the machine and demoed it for IBM in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. Her remarkable story deserves to be widely known.