How this long-lost Chinese typewriter from the 1940s changed modern computing

STANFORD, California — Scholars in the U.S., Taiwan and China are buzzing about the discovery of an old typewriter, because the long-lost machine is part of the origin story of modern Chinese computing — and central to ongoing questions about the politics of language. China’s entry into modern computing was critical in allowing the country to become the technological powerhouse it is today. But before this, some of the brightest Chinese minds of the 20th century had to figure out a way to harness the complex pictographs that make up written Chinese into a typewriter, and later, a computer. One man succeeded more than any other before him. His name was Lin Yutang, a noted linguist and writer from southern China. He made just one prototype of his Chinese typewriter, which he dubbed the MingKwai, “bright and clear” in Mandarin Chinese. Detailed U.S. patent records and diagrams of the typewriter from the 1940s are public, but the physical prototype went missing. Scholars assumed it was lost to history. “I had really, truly thought it was gone,” says Thomas Mullaney, a history professor at Stanford University who has studied Chinese computing for two decades and is the author of The Chinese Typewriter.

A chance discovery Mullaney was at a conference last year when he got a message that someone in upstate New York had found a strange machine in their basement and posted a picture of it on Facebook. “It was a sleepless night. I was randomly searching who the owner might be,” Mullaney recalls, laughing. Eventually, the owner reached out to him. They had acquired the typewriter from a relative who had worked at Mergenthaler Linotype, once of the most prominent U.S. makers of typesetting machines. The company helped craft the only known prototype of the MingKwai typewriter.

Mullaney later confirmed that the machine found in the New York basement was indeed the only prototype of Lin’s MingKwai typewriter. “It’s like a family member showing up at your doorstep and you had just assumed you would never see them,” Mullaney says. A globalist vision The story of why such a typewriter even exists runs parallel to the political upheaval and conflict over Chinese identity and politics in the 20th century.

Lin, its inventor, was born in 1895 in southern China during the tail end of a failing Qing dynasty. Student activists and radical thinkers were desperate to reform and strengthen China. Some proposed dismantling traditional Chinese culture in favor of Western science and technology, even eliminating Chinese characters altogether in favor of a Roman alphabet. “Lin Yutang charted a path right down the middle,” says Chia-Fang Tsai, the director of the Lin Yutang House, a foundation set up in Taiwan to commemorate the linguist’s work. That middle path would marry both east and west and preserve the Chinese language in the digital age. Typing Chinese was a monumental challenge. Chinese has no alphabet. Instead, it uses tens of thousands of pictographs. When Lin started his work in the early 20th century, there was no standardized version of Mandarin Chinese. Instead, people spoke hundreds of dialects and languages, meaning there was no singular phonetic spelling of the sound of each word. Lin had financial backing from the American writer Pearl S. Buck to create the typewriter, but he also sunk much of his own savings into the project as costs ballooned. “He’d spent a lot of money. A lot,” says Jill Lai Miller, Lin’s granddaughter. “But he was not one to carry a grudge” against his benefactors, she says.

One last secret The machine was acquired this year by Stanford University, which recently cleaned and restored the decades-old machine. It’s being kept in the university’s East Asia Library and will soon be on public display. One morning in June, Mullaney carefully opened the machine’s custom wooden boxing to show how the typewriter works. The typewriter’s ingenuity comes from the way Lin decided to break down Chinese pictographs: by their shapes, not sounds. The typist can search for certain combinations of shapes by pressing down on the ergonomic keyboard. Then, a small screen above the keyboard (Lin called it his “magic eye”) offers the typist up to eight possible characters that might match. In this way, the typewriter boasts the ability to retrieve up to 90,000 characters.

Stanford University Libraries has acquired the only known prototype of the MingKwai Chinese typewriter (明快打字機), the first Chinese typewriter to possess a keyboard.

‘It weighs a ton!’

Earlier this year, the Facebook messages and Reddit threads began circulating among antiquarians. While cleaning out her late grandfather’s basement in New York state, Jennifer Felix and her husband discovered an odd object that looked like a 40s-era typewriter with Chinese characters on the keys. Hoping to identify it, they turned to social media.

“From my internet search, it looks to be a Chinese-made MingKwai. I just can’t find any ever sold here in the states. Is it even worth anything? It weighs a ton!” Felix’s husband posted. Hundreds of typewriter experts, scholars, museum curators, and collectors responded from around the world, many offering to purchase the machine. “We knew then that this was a big deal,” Felix said.

One of the commenters pointed them to a book by Stanford scholar Thomas Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, which has a chapter dedicated to the MingKwai. After corresponding with Mullaney, who has published extensively on modern Chinese history and technology, Felix ultimately decided that the MingKwai belonged at Stanford. “I didn’t want this unique, one-of-a-kind piece of history to disappear again,” she said.

The MingKwai (“clear and fast”) was invented by the Chinese-born author, translator, and cultural commentator Lin Yutang in the 1940s. The 72-key machine was not a typewriter in the conventional sense, Mullaney wrote in The Chinese Typewriter, but rather an ingenious device designed to retrieve Chinese characters in a way that hadn’t been done before.

“The depression of keys did not result in the inscription of corresponding symbols, according to the classic what-you-type-is-what-you-get convention, but instead served as steps in the process of finding one’s desired Chinese characters from within the machine’s mechanical hard drive, and then inscribing them on the page.”

Depressing a key from one of the top three rows triggered a rotation of the machine’s internal workings; depressing one from the middle rows triggered a second rotation, bringing eight characters into view in a small window Lin called the “magic eye.” The typist then chose among them by depressing one of the numbered keys on the bottom row.

“Lin invented a machine that altered the very act of mechanical inscription by transforming inscription into a process of searching,” Mullaney said. “The MingKwai Chinese typewriter combined ‘search’ and ‘writing’ for arguably the first time in history, anticipating a human-computer interaction now referred to as input, or shuru in Chinese.”

In 1947, the Carl E. Krum Company built what is believed to be the sole prototype of Lin’s invention. A year later, in debt and unable to generate interest in mass producing his machine, Lin sold the prototype and the commercial rights to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, where Felix’s grandfather worked as a machinist. The company never manufactured the typewriter, and the prototype eventually disappeared, known to historians only through patent paperwork and related documents.

An extraordinary prototype made accessible for scholarship

At Stanford, the MingKwai will be used in research, exhibits, and academic programs.

“The MingKwai innovatively overcame the challenge of fitting the 80,000-plus characters of the Chinese language into a reasonably sized machine. Three keystrokes and the use of a special viewfinder – Lin’s “magic eye” – make a single impression on paper not corresponding to the symbols on the keyboard,” said Regan Murphy-Kao, director of the East Asia Library. “I couldn’t be happier to have the opportunity to steward, preserve, and make this extraordinary prototype accessible for scholarship.”

Support from the Bin Lin and Daisy Liu Family Foundation enabled Stanford University Libraries to acquire the MingKwai. The gift also includes a fund to provide for the machine’s care and maintenance.

“The Stanford University Libraries are most fortunate to receive this momentous discovery through the thoughtfulness of Jennifer Felix and the Bin Lin and Daisy Liu Family Foundation,” said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian. “The MingKwai and its complex, first-ever Chinese keyboard will fascinate students and scholars.”

For more information Thomas Mullaney is professor of history and, by courtesy, of East Asian languages and cultures in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is the director and co-PI of SILICON, the Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media.