The Chinese Typewriter: A History

The Chinese Typewriter is the first of Thomas Mullaney’s planned two-volume study of modern Chinese information technology. This reviewer cannot wait for the second. It is a deeply researched and expertly crafted work of historical scholarship that should capture the imaginations of design researchers who wish to preserve the centrality of the artefact in their studies while reaching beyond it. Although the topic addressed by the author is unfathomably complex, it can be stated with relative ease: the Western typewriter, introduced to the world by the likes of Remington, Underwood and Olivetti, features a keyboard in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between a particular key and the letterform that appears on the page when struck; I am performing a highly mediated version of this operation on my MacBook at this very moment. The radical simplicity of the phonetic vocabulary transmitted to us by our Phoenician, Greek and Latin ancestors lends itself naturally to this system. Moreover, with the permutations and combinations enabled by a paltry forty-seven keys and a shift bar, I can compose a sonnet, an irate letter to the editor or a book review for a learned journal. Not so with Chinese.