The Amazing History of the Chinese Typewriter: Thomas S. Mullaney The Chinese Typewriter

Abstract

The Amazing History of the Chinese TypewriterThomas S. Mullaney The Chinese Typewriter Michela Bussotti (bio) The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 504. Hardcover $34.95.) sheds light on a little explored subject while at the same time delivering a study on communication and information technology in China from the end of the Empire to the establishment of the Communist system (1840 to ca. 1950). The book is based on extensive research into both archival and material sources: Mullaney explains that he has worked in archives all over the world (p. 32) and he provides a list of around thirty machines referenced in his research (pp. 401–3). In New York in January 2019, an exhibition of his collection was organized by the East Asia Library of Stanford University at The Museum of Chinese in America. Before the notes (pp. 337–400), readers will find a Table of Archives, a list of historical figures mentioned in the book, and a Character Glossary (pp. 323–36). The book, which contains a substantial number of tables and black-and-white photographs, ends with a Bibliography of Sources (pp. 401–55) and an Index (pp. 457–81). It is possible that the book will receive a mixed response due to the style of presentation of its content: it is rich in details and digressions, which some readers will find fascinating and others less so. This is true of the opening pages, in which the unusual order of the Parade of Nations at the 2008 Beijing Olympics is used to describe the (non-alphabetical) nature of the Chinese language, and in which the author explains that most of the technologies used in information services and the reproduction of scripts over the course of the last 200 years—Morse code, monotype and linotype, typewriting, optical character recognition, etc.—were developed with a [End Page 896] Latin alphabet in mind (p. 9). Indeed, the "Introduction" (pp. 1–33) is largely dedicated to a reflection on the Chinese language, a subject that informs the whole book. Its characters, seen as symbols of unity and continuity, were also perceived, in some quarters, sometimes in China itself, as an obstacle to progress. Mullaney details for us the discovery of Chinese techno-linguistic modernity, but the narrative is anything but one of the triumphal transfer of Western technology to the East. History is made up of sometimes awkward attempts at progress, of complicated circumstances, and dramatic events. The Chinese typewriter often found itself in a "compromised space" and was eventually put to one side. The book opens with a presentation of the Smith Premier double-keyboard typewriters of the 1890s. Later, firms like Remington and Olivetti imposed, on a global scale, a unique model with a single-shift keyboard. Different styles of writing could be mastered by modifying this basic model. Chinese was not one of them. This led to the emergence of the notion of a lack of "technological fitness" due to the defective adoption of imported information technologies. The enormous, ridiculous machines featuring characters traced over in caricatured representations a hundred years ago are no more than a reflection of this approach (chapter 1, "Incompatible with Modernity," pp. 35–74). In "Puzzling Chinese" (chapter 2, pp. 75–121), Mullaney introduces three useful and much-used approaches to typewriting: "common usage," or the classification of characters on the basis of their use; "combinatorialism," which consists in thinking of characters as an ensemble of graphic elements to be associated and disassociated; and "surrogacy," the establishment of a symbolic system for characters. This last approach was first exemplified by Morse, in which Chinese was translated into Arabic numerals for telegraphic transmission and was thus assimilated with the secret languages used at the time (with the additional specificity that Chinese did not have a plaintext version). The first two approaches were associated with the activities of William Gamble (electrotyping) and Marcellin Legrand (typography). In both cases, the objective was to "rationalize" the production of fonts according to how often they were used, and to produce punches that made it possible to reset different elements of individual characters as well as to create matrices. In chapter 3 ("Radical...