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Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Only one -- the prototype -- was ever made. Advertisement 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Mullaney's mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything. Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language -- around 100,000, by some estimates -- there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost. Advertisement Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole. It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter? Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor's take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable -- a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology. Mullaney was fascinated. That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise. He cold-called strangers and left voicemail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, 'Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?' Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Mullaney said, Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet. He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to 'clear and fast.' Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer. Advertisement It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn. And that, as far as Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine's last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared. In his 2017 book, 'The Chinese Typewriter,' Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrap heap. This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Felix's father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. 'What's this?' Jennifer Felix asked her husband. He'd had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it's that typewriter. She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Nelson Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called 'What's My Typewriter Worth?' and posted some photos. Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Nelson Felix checked on his post. There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom. The couple looked at each other. 'Who's Tom?' Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off -- ping, ping, ping. The small community of people he'd encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention. As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai. Advertisement But he didn't rejoice. He didn't sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear. What if they didn't know what they had and sold it before he could get to it? Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that. He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in
New York Times
22-07-2025
- Science
- New York Times
The Quest for a Lost Chinese Typewriter
In 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself way out in the suburbs of London. A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was going to be renovating her house soon, she told him, and it needed a new home. Dr. Mullaney, a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years searching the globe for Chinese typewriters, wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of Chinese characters while remaining small enough to keep on a desk. The typewriter, 50 pounds of metal frame and levers, was one of a dying breed. If he didn't save it, would it wind up on a scrapheap? It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices that he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Dr. Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Only one — the prototype — was ever made. 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
First Chinese typewriter rediscovered in grandfather's basement
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways A unique experimental typewriter stored in a New York state basement for decades turned out to be a one-of-a-kind piece of communications history. According to an announcement from Stanford University, historians and one unsuspecting granddaughter have rediscovered the long-missing MingKwai machine. Earlier this year, Jennifer Felix and her husband were working to clean out her recently deceased grandfather's home when they came across a large, extremely heavy typewriting device. However, instead of a more traditional setup the contraption featured five rows of keys topped with Chinese characters. After reaching out for help online, Felix realized her grandfather had been the owner of the MingKwai—one man's innovative, if ultimately doomed, attempt to incorporate the Chinese language onto a mechanical typewriter. The typewriter used a 'database' of words instead of phonetic spelling. Credit: Elisabeth von Boch A challenging typewriter English has it easy. The 26 standard character phonetic alphabet is pretty simple to memorize, especially when compared to symbolic written languages like Mandarin Chinese. While official lists range anywhere from 80,000–10,000 symbols, even an everyday Mandarin dictionary can contain as many as 20,000 unique icons. Today's modern computer keyboards frequently rely on the Cangje input method developed by Chu Bong-Foo in 1976 that can be overlaid on a QWERTY setup–the standard keyboard most of us know. But over three decades before that, an author, translator, and cultural commentator named Lin Yutang attempted a completely different approach for typing in his native language. Translating to 'Clear and Fast,' Lin began designing the MingKwai sometime during the 1940s. Instead of trying to overlay Cangje onto English buttons, his 72-key invention transformed sequential mechanical typing into a search-based process that foreshadowed today's computer operations. '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,' Stanford scholar Thomas Mullaney wrote in his 2018 book, The Chinese Typewriter: A History. After selecting multiple options, a final set of eight choices displayed on the 'magic eye.' Credit: Elisabeth von Boch How the MingKwai 'worked' Here's how the MingKwai ostensibly worked: First, pressing a key on one of the top three rows initiated internal mechanisms to rotate towards a set of characters. Selecting a second key from one of the middle two rows then narrowed down that selection to eight characters displayed in a window Lin nicknamed the 'magic eye.' Users lastly pressed the numerical corresponding to the desired character, which MingKwai then put to paper. 'Lin invented a machine that altered the very act of mechanical inscription by transforming inscription into a process of searching,' explained Mullaney. '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.' Lin commissioned the Carl E. Krum Company to build the only known MingKwai prototype in 1947. Unfortunately, the concept never managed to generate enough interest to finance its mass production. He eventually sold his MingKwai and its rights to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, the business that employed his grandfather as a machinist. At some point in the years afterwards, the MingKwai wound up in the possession of Jennifer Felix's grandfather, where it remained until just recently. Stanford will make the MingKwai available for researchers and public exhibits. Credit: Elisabeth von Boch Asking the experts… and crowdsourcing While Felix was unsure about the machine's purpose at first, it didn't take long before she realized what was in her hands—or, given its weight, on her table. Her husband's initial post to social media garnered hundreds of responses from experts, museum curators, and scholars, many pointing to the long-lost MingKwai and Mullaney's book. After reaching out to Mullaney, Felix was confident in what they had in their possession. To ensure the piece's preservation, she eventually offered the MingKwai to Stanford. In its new home, Lin's remarkable experiment will soon be available for research, academic analysis, and public exhibits.
