The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  When Escayrac de Lauture authored this piece, his ambitions extended far beyond Chinese. In a second piece by the Frenchman, entitled Analytic Universal Telegraphy and released in 1862 as well, Escayrac de Lauture outlined a grand redesign of telegraphic communication as a whole, based upon what might be understood as an early foray into automated or “machine translation,” as it would come to be known one century later. “The telegraph wants a language that is more succinct and intelligible to all people,” he argued, as he took stock of the still-novel technology of telegraphy as it extended its reach across the globe. “I will demonstrate that such a language is not a utopia—that it is not only possible, but simple, proper, and necessary.”45 Here was a vital way in which Escayrac de Lauture’s puzzle departed from those of Staunton, Gamble, Pauthier, and Legrand, beyond technical questions pertaining to differences between surrogacy, combinatorialism, and common usage. These individuals had, whether in common usage or divisible type, puzzled Chinese in such a way as to bring it within the “compass” of European movable type—to reconcile Chinese to Europe and the West. Escayrac de Lauture’s puzzle was different. By focusing upon the question of Chinese telegraphic transmission—this most challenging of telegraphic languages—his goal was not to subordinate Chinese script under one or another Western and alphabetic information technology, but to make it a laboratory case through which to imagine how all languages and scripts—alphabetic and nonalphabetic alike—might have equal footing by being subordinated within a shared, universal telegraphic language. For Escayrac de Lauture, to puzzle Chinese meant puzzling the entire semiotic structure of telegraphy itself, root and branch.

  As Escayrac de Lauture dreamt of a telegraphic language “more succinct and intelligible to all people,” the international telegraphic community was traveling along a very different trajectory—one that did not please this Frenchman in the slightest. At telegraphy’s inception, the entrepreneurial Samuel Morse referred to the new invention as “the American telegraph” and, even more intimately, “my telegraph.”46 Even as Morse eagerly promoted the technology in Russia, western and southern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Japan, and parts of the African continent, the telegraph code upon which it was based remained fundamentally connected to the Latin alphabet and the English language—that is, to the fabric of Morse’s linguistic world.47 With the short “dot,” the long “dash,” and code sequences ranging primarily from one to four units in length, the code was originally designed to accommodate thirty discrete units: just sufficient to encompass the twenty-six English letters, with four code spaces remaining. Essential symbols—such as Arabic numerals and a select few punctuation marks—could then be relegated to the less efficient realm of five-unit code sequences (later expanded to the even less efficient six-unit sequences in “Continental Morse”).48

  While the code was ideally suited to handle English, the same could not be said for other languages—even alphabetic ones. With its thirty letters, German bumped up against the limits of the code’s capacity, while French and its multiplicity of accented letters spilled out beyond it. Nevertheless, such Anglocentrism was further reinforced by the International Telegraphic Union in its original list of signifiers permitted for telegraphic transmission. At the ITU conference in Vienna in 1868, the collection of acceptable symbols was confined to the twenty-six unaccented letters of the English language, the ten Arabic numerals, and a small group of sixteen symbols (being the period, comma, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation point, apostrophe, cross, hyphen, e-acute (é), fraction bar, equal sign, left parenthesis, right parenthesis, ampersand, and guillemet).49

  The expansion of telegraphy’s authorized list of transmittable symbols was an extremely conservative and slow affair, moreover. It was not until 1875, for example, that the Saint Petersburg conference of the ITU finally expanded the original list of twenty-six letters to include a twenty-seventh: the accented “e” (é), now no longer sequestered to the specialized list of “signes de ponctuation et autres.”50 The conference further stipulated that, for those using Morse code, it would now be possible to transmit six other special, accented symbols: Ä, Á, Å, Ñ, Ö, and Ü.51 It was not until the London conference of 1903, almost two decades later, that this supplemental list of accented letters was granted admission into the “standard” semiotic repertoire.52

  Just as Escayrac de Lauture was authoring his essay, moreover, the 1860s witnessed the accelerated expansion of modern colonialism and with it a rapid development of the telegraphic network beyond the Latin alphabetic world. In 1864, cables were laid in the Persian Gulf that, when connected to the existing landline system, put India into direct telegraphic connection with Europe.53 In 1870, a further rapid expansion saw cables laid from the Suez to Aden and Bombay, and from Madras to Penang, Singapore, and Batavia.54 Such growth brought telegraphy into contact with scripts it had not been originally designed to handle, raising a profound question: Would the inclusion of new languages, scripts, alphabets, and syllabaries prompt a radical reimagination of telegraphy itself, or would they be absorbed and subordinated to the logic and syntax of existing approaches?

  Escayrac de Lauture, for one, was optimistic about the possibilities of just such a radical redesign—an optimism that inspired his Chinese foray in 1862, nearly a decade before the Qing empire was incorporated into the international telegraphic network.55 While the physical technology of the telegraph—the machinery of it—was an achievement that granted humans a power bordering on the godlike, the Frenchman argued, the semiotic architecture of telegraphy remained crude and bounded, too closely connected to actually existing human languages (namely English—but also alphabetic languages more broadly). Escayrac de Lauture called for the development of a perfect universal symbolic language whose sophistication would measure up to the brilliance of the machine, rather than hold it back. The test case for this universal telegraphic language would be Chinese, whose eventual integration into global telegraphy would form a crossroads: Would Chinese simply be absorbed into the existing, all-too-human and all-too-English Morse code, or would humanity finally develop a new, universal language worthy of this new technology?

  It was in his second essay, Analytic Universal Telegraphy, that Escayrac de Lauture ventured from the question of Chinese telegraphic transmission to the question of universal telegraphic transmission. In this fifteen-page treatise, Escayrac de Lauture outlined his vision for the creation of an “algebra of language,” as he termed it—one that would enable telegraphers around the world to traffic directly in meaning, despite the language barriers that separated them.56 Specifically, he mapped out a series of tables in which was positioned an abbreviated lexicon of terms and phrases consisting of between 450 and 600 words. “Discourse is like a calculation that uses words,” Escayrac de Lauture wrote, arguing that “we must find the algebra of this calculation.” “We must find the common measure of thought and human discourse,” he continued. A “language of facts and numbers,” he called it: “a language without poetry, hovering above the vulgarities of common life.”57

  Escayrac de Lauture set out to create a “catalog of principal ideas” (idées principales) that established the core meaning underlying every possible human utterance, which would then be qualified by recourse to “accessory ideas” (idées accessoires).58 To transmit the term “indifference,” for example, Escayrac de Lauture’s system would transmit the principal idea “affection,” qualified by the accessory idea “negated.” To convey “hatred,” by contrast, involved sending “affection” qualified by “opposite.” Scales or levels of intensity could also be communicated, enabling one to use “affection” to express adoration, love, repulsion, horror, and even execration through the appropriate use of modifiers.59

  Through the development of corresponding tables in all the languages of the world—tables like those in Escayrac de Lauture’s Chinese telegraph code—telegraphic transmission would, he felt, finally achieve its full global potential by enabling humans to traffi
c directly in meaning: to transmit a telegram, one need only identify the address of the principal and accessory terms within one’s own vocabulary, and one’s interlocutor would be able to locate the corresponding meanings—reconstituting them just as one would the character shuo (說) upon receipt of yan (言)and dui (兑). Reception of foreign transmissions would be straightforward, Escayrac de Lauture felt certain. “Without knowing even one of these words,” he assured his readers, “one could, with the aid of a simple vocabulary, establish the meaning of a sentence with certainty.”60 The telegraph language Escayrac de Lauture proposed, he felt sure, “would be more appropriate for international communications than any known language.”61

  Double Mediation: The Chinese Telegraph Code of 1871

  In 1871, the growing network of telegraphic communication reached the shores of the Qing empire, with a single line opened between Shanghai and Hong Kong in April of that year. Carried out by two foreign companies—the Great Northern Telegraph Company of Denmark and the Eastern Extension A&C Telegraph Company of the United Kingdom—the installation of this line marked the initial step in the construction of an empire- and then nationwide communications web, woven one filament at a time. A line was installed between Saigon and Hong Kong in June 1871, another between Shanghai and Nagasaki in August, and a third between Nagasaki and Vladivostok in November. In the ensuing years, this network expanded to encompass Amoy, Tianjin, Fuzhou, and other cities throughout the empire.62 Chinese authorities and companies would steadily gain ownership of this web, and expand it to a total length of approximately sixty-two thousand miles by the middle of the Republican period (1911–1949).63

  With the entrance of China and the Chinese language into international telegraphy, however, what ensued was not a reimagination of the modes or syntax of telegraphic transmission, as contemplated by Escayrac de Lauture. Instead, the Chinese telegraph code of 1871—invented by two foreigners—left the global information infrastructure of Morse code unaltered, while placing Chinese script in a position of structurally embedded inequality. Developed by a Danish professor of astronomy named H.C.F.C. Schjellerup and formalized by the French harbormaster in Shanghai, Septime Auguste Viguier, the code of 1871 drew its inspiration from the common usage mode.64 A group of approximately 6,800 common usage Chinese characters was organized according to the Kangxi radical-stroke system, and then assigned a series of distinct, four-digit numerical codes running from 0001 to 9999. Approximately 3,000 blank spaces were left at the end of the code book, and a few blank spaces left within each radical class, so that individual operators could include otherwise infrequently used characters essential for their work.65 To transmit a Chinese telegram using this system, the telegrapher began by looking a character up in the code book, finding its four-digit cipher, and then transmitting this cipher using standard Morse signals (figures 2.9 and 2.10).

  2.9 1871 Chinese telegraph code (sample)

  2.10 Sample of Chinese telegram and encryption process

  The code designed by Schjellerup and Viguier thus placed Chinese script within a fundamentally different relationship with telegraphic transmission protocols than alphabetic and syllabic scripts. If Escayrac de Lauture had imagined a universal telegraphic language in which every script would be governed by the same, shared protocols of encoding and transmission, the 1871 code was premised upon an additional or double mediation of Chinese: a first layer mediating between Chinese characters and Arabic numerals, and a second layer mediating between Arabic numerals and the long and short pulses of telegraphic transmission. By contrast, the transmission of English, French, German, Russian, and other languages involved only one layer of mediation—from letters or syllables directly to the machinic code of dots and dashes. In order for Chinese to enter the machine code of telegraphy, then, Chinese script would first need to pass through an additional foreign semiotic layer—in this case, that of Arabic numerals, but also conceivably the letters of the Latin alphabet. Chinese script would be doubly governed: first by the same dot-dash protocols as all other languages in the domain of telegraphy, but prior to that, by the Latin alphabet as it operated in English and Morse.

  With the rapid demise of Escayrac de Lauture’s dream, the politics of surrogacy played out in deleterious ways for the Chinese script. First and most basically, the only symbolic units to be employed in Chinese telegraphic transmission were Arabic numerals, which themselves were the longest and most expensive code units within Morse (figure 2.11). The shortest numerical code (the number “5” with its five short pulses) was already five times longer than the shortest letter (“e” with its single short pulse). The numeral “0” was the longest transmission sequence in the entire code, requiring five long pulses. Overall, then, its status as a purely numerical system retarded the Chinese telegraph code from the outset.66

  2.11 Morse code

  Beyond the question of cost, the double mediation of Chinese exerted a second, even costlier penalty upon the script. Owing to its reliance on numeric encipherment, the 1871 Chinese telegraph code inadvertently rendered Chinese vulnerable to an ever-changing and proliferating number of legal and tariff penalties originally designed, not with Chinese in mind, but rather “secret” or “encoded” forms of telegraphic transmission. By the time Chinese script entered the world of telegraphy, the use of enciphered and encoded transmission within the alphabetic world was practically ubiquitous, being the rule rather than the exception in global telegraphy.67 Decades earlier, telegraphers concerned with secrecy, and more so with saving money, began to develop a wide array of telegraph codes that could be used in coordination with Morse.68 The dominant objective of codes was to save money on transmission by creating code words that represented longer sequences, including entire sentences. Using a code book from 1885, for example, receipt of the single word “toothbrush” conveyed the much longer phrase “Telegram has been delayed in transmission.” Meanwhile “gasping” conveyed “Send the goods that are ready, and expedite the remainder.”69

  Confronted with the mid-century spread of coded languages, governments and cable companies pushed for amendments to the international telegraphic system, in terms of both permission and pricing. A maze of regulations was designed to police and limit the use of such encrypted transmissions. Codes and “numbered languages” (langues chiffrées) were repeatedly barred from use in telegram addresses and in many other types of communications. In terms of pricing, “secret” transmissions were almost universally assessed at significantly higher per-word costs, so that cable companies could recuperate the revenue they were otherwise losing. As a practical consequence of such regulations, telegraphers operating in English, French, German, or any of the other telegraphic languages were thus presented with a constant choice: namely, whether to transmit a message in code or “in the clear”—otherwise known as “plaintext.”

  None of these regulations had anything to do with Chinese script in the slightest, and yet they would come to have profound implications for Chinese characters immediately upon the language’s entrance into global telegraphy. By virtue of its behavior as a “numbered language” or langue chiffrée, the Chinese telegraph code—and with it the Chinese language—was unrecognizable to the international telegraphic world as anything other than a secret language. Phrased differently, whereas all other telegraphic languages were understood to exist in one of two conditions—as “plaintext” or as “secret”—Chinese was the one telegraphic language which was legally understood as inherently secret—a script that possessed no plaintext version. This status was not, it bears emphasizing, because of any inherent properties of Chinese script—but solely because the international telegraphic union had opted, understandably but nonetheless harmfully, to “absorb” Chinese into the existing Morse regime “as is,” rather than taking the globalization of telegraphy as an occasion to reimagine and universalize the semiotic protocols of telegraphy in a thoroughgoing, genuine sense—as Escayrac de Lauture had once imagined. In order for Chinese script to partic
ipate in the telegraphic revolution, it alone would have to pass through a semiotic terrain of Arabic numerals and Latin letters over which it possessed no authority—a space where the Chinese script would be exposed to prerogatives, punitive tariffs, and usage restrictions that had nothing to do with Chinese itself, but rather with the foreign symbols upon which Chinese script now had no choice but to rely.70

  Living Under Encryption: Experiments in Hypermediation

  Beginning in the twentieth century, Chinese authorities and companies would steadily gain ownership of the physical infrastructure of telegraphy in the empire—and then the Republic.71 Invited to join the international telegraphic conference in 1883, the Qing eventually dispatched a representative to the Lisbon conference of 1909.72 In 1908, China’s Ministry of Communications would take over control of the Chinese Telegraph Administration, originally formed in 1882. In 1912, China was home to 565 telegraph offices, a figure that expanded to 1,094 by 1932. The length of line nearly doubled over the same period, from 62,523 kilometers in 1912 to just over one hundred thousand kilometers in 1932.73 At the same time, however, the Chinese telegraph code of 1871 and its derivations continued to embed China and the Chinese script within a place of comparative disadvantage long after “telegraph sovereignty” (dianxin zhuquan) had been redeemed in a political and economic sense. Long after Chinese authorities took possession of the materiality of cables and towers, as well as financial and legal authority, the problem of semiotic sovereignty remained unresolved.

  As representatives of the Qing and the Chinese Republic began to take a direct role in the international telegraphic community, attempts were made to improve the disadvantaged position of Chinese. In particular, Chinese ministers and engineers spearheaded an initiative through which they secured a peculiar legal exemption for the four-digit Chinese telegraph code, removing it from the category of “coded,” “secret,” and “enciphered” scripts, and securing for it the status of de jure “plaintext.” In a moment both sublime and brilliant, Chinese representatives successfully established the four-digit code as the artificial equivalent of Chinese “plaintext”—despite the fact that it was not “plain” at all by prevailing standards of telegraphic communication. Beginning as early as 1893, any four-digit Chinese transmission recognized as a “bona fide” Chinese character—that is, a four-digit code that corresponded directly and meaningfully to one of the characters found in the 1871 code book—was to be counted as a single “word” when transmitted between stations in China.74 A Chinese transmission would henceforth only be considered “secret” if the four-digit codes had in some way been further manipulated or permuted by the transmitter for reasons of privacy.