Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs. [1] An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters. [2] Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, following the invention of the Japanese typewriter by Kyota Sugimoto, which use kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system. [3] At least sixty different models of Chinese typewriter have been produced, ranging from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors.
A mechanical engineer from Wuxi, Jiangsu named Zhou Houkun (Hou-Kun Chow; 周厚坤; b. 1887) co-invented the first mass-produced Chinese typewriter. [4] As a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zhou first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter while inspecting American models in Boston. His initial efforts were hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai. [2] [5]
Zhou considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for each character. Instead, his design involved a revolving cylinder that contained the characters ordered by radical and stroke count, like in a Chinese dictionary. Zhou completed an initial prototype in 1914, and by 1916 he had attracted interest from the media and potential manufacturers. [6] However, his design was heavy at 18 kg (40 lb), which was later reduced to about 14 kg (31 lb). [2] The Commercial Press had obtained the rights to his machine and possession of the prototype by 1919. [7] Following improvements to the design by an engineer working for the Commercial Press named Shu Changyu (舒昌鈺), which included replacing the cylinder with a flat bed customizable by typists, the model entered mass production in 1919. [8]
Zhou expected his typewriter to be used in Chinese offices where multiple copies of documents would have to be made, and by Chinese living in foreign countries without access to skilled writers of Chinese. [2]
On 28 June 1944, Chung-Chin Kao (高仲芹; b. 1906), an inventor at IBM, applied for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for his electric Chinese typewriter, and was issued US patent number 2412777 for his invention on 17 December 1946. [9] [10] The typewriter employed 36 keys divided across four banks. The first bank had six keys numbered 0 through 5; the other three each had 10 keys numbered 0 through 9. To type a character, the operator was required to simultaneously select one key from each of the four banks. Each of those four-digit combinations corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, or other symbols such as punctuation marks, which were etched onto the surface of a revolving drum inside the typewriter. The drum had a diameter of 7 inches, a length of 11 inches, and made a complete revolution once per second, allowing the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute. [11]
Chinese typewriters made in Japan entered the market in the 1920s, with the Wanneng (万能) brand, introduced by the Nippon Typewriter Company in 1940 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, becoming the de facto standard. After Japan's defeat and the subsequent nationalization of typewriter companies by the Communist government, locally made models based on the Wanneng continued to dominate the market, particularly the Double Pigeon (双鸽; Shuānggē). [12]
The inventor, linguist, and author Lin Yutang (1895–1976) filed a patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for an electric typewriter for Chinese on 17 April 1946, which was granted on 14 October 1952. [13] Lin called his typewriter design "MingKwai", derived from the characters 明 (míng) and 快 (kuài), meaning 'clear' and 'quick' respectively. [14]
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 cm × 46 cm × 23 cm (14.2 in × 18.1 in × 9.1 in). 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. [15] Characters are selected by pressing two keys to choose a desired character, which is arranged according to the system Lin devised for his Chinese-language dictionary, which lexicographically orders characters using thirty geometric shapes or strokes as tokens, akin to letters in an alphabet. This system broke with the long-standing system of radicals and stroke order as a means of indexing characters. The selected Chinese character appeared in the magic eye for preview, [15] the typist then pressed a "master" key, similar to today's computer function key. The typewriter could create 90000 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. [15]
Lin's typewriter was not produced commercially. Lin's daughter Lin Tai-yi was to demonstrate use of the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company on they could not make it work. [16] While the machine was fixed for a press conference the next day, no further progress was made in attracting potential manufacturers. Lin had by now acquired considerable debt. [17]
The Mergenthaler Linotype Company bought the rights for the typewriter from Lin in 1948. The Cold War had begun and the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to research cryptography and machine translation. The United States Air Force acquired the keyboard to study machine translation and disk storage for rapid access to large quantities of information. The Air Force then handed the keyboard to Gilbert W. King, the director of research at IBM. King moved to Itek and authored a seminal scientific paper on machine translation. He also unveiled the Sinowriter, a devise for converting Chinese-character texts into machine input codes for processing Chinese into English. [18]
According to Thomas S. Mullaney, it is possible that development of modern Chinese typewriters in the 1960s and 1970s influenced the development of modern computer word processors and even affected the development of computers themselves. In the 1950s, typists came to rearrange the character layout from the standard dictionary layout to groups of common words and phrases. [19] Chinese typewriter engineers were trying to make the most common characters accessible at the fastest speed possible by autocompletion, a technique used today in input methods for many languages, not only Chinese. [15] This arrangement was called the 'associative' (联想; 聯想; liánxiǎng) layout, similar to predictive text, and sped typing speeds from about 20 words per minute to around 80. [19]
The Chinese typewriter has become a metaphor for absurdity, complexity and backwardness in Western popular culture. One such example is MC Hammer's dance move named after the Chinese typewriter in the music video for "U Can't Touch This". The move, with its fast-paced and large gestures, supposedly resembles a person working on a huge, complex typewriter. [20]
The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley". [21] The last Chinese typewriters were completed around 1991. [19] Stone developed software based on Alps Electric custom-made 8088 based hardware [22] [ better source needed ] with a dot matrix printer from Brother Industries, distributed by Mitsui, to print Chinese characters, and released the system as the MS-2400. [15] [23]
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient, while graphical methods allow faster input, but have a steep learning curve.
A keyset or chorded keyboard is a computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a "chord" on a piano. The large number of combinations available from a small number of keys allows text or commands to be entered with one hand, leaving the other hand free. A secondary advantage is that it can be built into a device that is too small to contain a normal-sized keyboard.
QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: QWERTY. The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold via E. Remington and Sons from 1874. QWERTY became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains in ubiquitous use.
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against the paper with a type element. Thereby, the machine produces a legible written document composed of ink and paper. By the end of the 19th century, a person who used such a device was also referred to as a typewriter.
The IBM Electric were an early series of electric typewriters that IBM manufactured, starting in the mid-1930s. They used the conventional moving carriage and typebar mechanism, as opposed to the fixed carriage and type ball used in the IBM Selectric, introduced in 1961. After 1944, each model came in both "Standard" and "Executive" versions, the latter featuring proportional spacing.
Lin Yutang was a Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator. He had an informal style in both Chinese and English, and he made compilations and translations of the Chinese classics into English. Some of his writings criticized the racism and imperialism of the West.
Typing is the process of writing or inputting text by pressing keys on a typewriter, computer keyboard, mobile phone, or calculator. It can be distinguished from other means of text input, such as handwriting and speech recognition. Text can be in the form of letters, numbers and other symbols. The world's first typist was Lillian Sholes from Wisconsin in the United States, the daughter of Christopher Sholes, who invented the first practical typewriter.
The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter produced by the Friden Calculating Machine Company. It was a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape.
A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, and the stamp. The term was also used for similar machines used by humans to transcribe data onto punched tape media.
The Diablo 630 is a discontinued daisy wheel style computer printer sold by the Diablo Data Systems division of the Xerox Corporation beginning in 1980. The printer is capable of letter-quality printing; that is, its print quality is equivalent to the quality of an IBM Selectric typewriter or printer, the de facto quality standard of the time.
The Blickensderfer typewriter was invented by George Canfield Blickensderfer (1850–1917) and patented on April 12, 1892. Blickensderfer was a nephew of John Celivergos Zachos, the inventor of the stenotype. Two models, Model 1 and Model 5, were unveiled to the public at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Model 5 was a stripped-down version of the bigger, more complex Model 1. These machines were intended to compete with larger Remington, Hammond and Yost typewriters, and were the first truly portable, full-keyboard typewriters. The design also enabled the typist to see the typed work, at a time when most typewriters were understrike machines that concealed the writing. When Blickensderfer unveiled his small Model 5, its compactness and novel features attracted huge crowds and many orders.
The Oliver Typewriter Company was an American typewriter manufacturer headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The Oliver Typewriter was one of the first "visible print" typewriters, meaning text was visible to the typist as it was entered. Oliver typewriters were marketed heavily for home use, using local distributors and sales on credit. Oliver produced more than one million machines between 1895 and 1928 and licensed its designs to several international firms.
Olivetti is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers, calculators, and fax machines. It was founded as a typewriter manufacturer by Camillo Olivetti in 1908 in the Turin commune of Ivrea, Italy.
Lucien Stephen Crandall was an American inventor of typewriters, adding machines and electrical devices. Crandall gave his name to several typewriters, and he was also involved in the development of various machines, such as the project to produce the Hammond design at the Remington factory, or later the International typewriter.
The first practical Japanese typewriter was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. Out of the thousands of kanji characters, Kyota's original typewriter used 2,400 of them. He obtained the patent rights to the typewriter that he invented in 1929. Sugimoto's typewriter met its competition when the Oriental Typewriter was invented by Shimada Minokichi. The Otani Japanese Typewriter Company and Toshiba also released their own typewriters later.
The IBM Selectric was a highly successful line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961.
The Sholes and Glidden typewriter was the first commercially successful typewriter. Principally designed by the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, it was developed with the assistance of fellow printer Samuel W. Soule and amateur mechanic Carlos S. Glidden. Work began in 1867, but Soule left the enterprise shortly thereafter, replaced by James Densmore, who provided financial backing and the driving force behind the machine's continued development. After several short-lived attempts to manufacture the device, the machine was acquired by E. Remington and Sons in early 1873. An arms manufacturer seeking to diversify, Remington further refined the typewriter before finally placing it on the market on July 1, 1874.
Dvorak is a keyboard layout for English patented in 1936 by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, William Dealey, as a faster and more ergonomic alternative to the QWERTY layout. Dvorak proponents claim that it requires less finger motion and as a result reduces errors, increases typing speed, reduces repetitive strain injuries, or is simply more comfortable than QWERTY.
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, compiled by the linguist and author Lin Yutang, contains over 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 words and phrases, including many neologisms. Lin's dictionary made two lexicographical innovations, neither of which became widely used. Collation is based on his graphical "Instant Index System" that assigns numbers to Chinese characters based on 33 basic calligraphic stroke patterns. Romanization of Chinese is by Lin's "Simplified National Romanization System", which he developed as a prototype for the Gwoyeu Romatzyh or "National Romanization" system adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. Lin's bilingual dictionary continues to be used in the present day, particularly the free online version that the Chinese University of Hong Kong established in 1999.