Before the computer, there was something almost as complex: the Chinese typewriter

by Julie Makinen

For more than a century, Chinese typewriters have been objects of curiosity, confusion and even a fair bit of ridicule — after all, how do you type a language that has no alphabet?

On “The Simpsons,” smarty-pants Lisa was confounded by an imaginary one that featured countless buttons covered in complicated-looking characters. One of hip-hop artist MC Hammer’s frenetic, high-stepping dance routines was nicknamed the “Chinese Typewriter” because its furious moves supposedly mimicked the flailing that would be required of a Chinese typist trying to quickly hop about a massive keyboard.

But now, an associate professor at Stanford University is trying to give these esoteric contraptions a bit more of their due, arguing that the misunderstood machines — long dismissed as less practical and less efficient than alphabetic typewriters — actually pioneered familiar smartphone-era technologies, including predictive text and autocomplete.

“The Western typewriter has become a cult object; there are hundreds upon hundreds of collectors and museums. People collect and fetishize them,” professor Tom Mullaney said. “But Chinese typewriters are exquisite machines. They are very different. They are typewriters without a keyboard, and that often confounds peoples’ imaginations.”

Chinese typewriters look something like a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press. There are no keys, just thousands of little metal characters arranged in a grid system. Because Chinese has no alphabet and no alphabetical order, the operator must essentially memorize the location of each character — about 2,500 on a typical machine.

Sort of by accident, Mullaney has become an expert on, collector of and evangelist for Chinese (and Japanese) typewriters after obtaining his first specimen from a man who was getting rid of one once used by a Chinese American church in San Francisco.

Since he caught the typewriter bug in 2008, Mullaney has collected 12 machines — which might not sound that impressive, but that’s four times as many as China’s only typewriter museum, in Shanghai. He’s lectured about them at Google and around Silicon Valley. ...

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