75 The system was further mediated, moreover, through what appears to have been one or another Chinese dialect—perhaps Cantonese. That is, while table 2.1 lists only the pinyin pronunciation of each character in putonghua, a close consideration of particular letter-character combinations indicates that the pairings were quite likely made with a Chinese dialect in mind. The pairing of zai and “j” only makes sense, for example, when we consider its Cantonese pronunciation joi. The same is true for the “w,” whose accompanying character is pronounced wu in Cantonese; and the letter “y” whose character is pronounced wai. Other elements within the list suggest a dialect other than Cantonese, however, such as the character used to represent “k” (凱—which is pronounced hoi in Cantonese). My thanks to Roy Chan for bringing this wrinkle to my attention. See Ministry of Communications (Jiaotong bu) [交通部], Plaintext and Secret Telegraph Code—New Edition (Mingmi dianma xinbian) [明密碼電報新編] (Shanghai: n.p., 1916); Ministry of Communications (Jiaotong bu) [交通部], Plaintext and Secret Telegraph Code—New Edition (Mingmi dianma xinbian) [明密電碼新編] (Nanjing: Jinghua yinshu guan [南京印書館], 1933), Rigsarkivet [Danish National Archives], Copenhagen, Denmark, 10619 GN Store Nord A/S. 1870–1969 Kode- og telegrafbøger, Kodebøger 1924–1969; Ministry of Communications (Jiaotong bu) [交通部], Plaintext and Secret Telegraph Code—New Edition (Mingmi dianma xinbian) [明密電碼新編] (n.p.: Jiaotongbu kanxing [交通部刊行], 1946).
76 Changing regulations governing international telegraphic communication often closed pathways of mediation as well. Trigraph encryption was eventually limited by the very same corporate and statist watchdogs that policed money-saving and/or clandestine communication. By the early nineteenth century, all telegraphic transmissions had to be “pronounceable”—a somewhat vague designation which translated more concretely into the mandatory inclusion of a minimum number of vowels within any coded transmission. Long sequences of consonants would no longer be permitted, thereby greatly reducing the number of code spaces in the original trigraph system.
77 Ministry of Communications (Jiaotong bu) [交通部], Plaintext and Secret Telegraph Code—New Edition (Mingmi dianma xinbian) [明密電碼新編] (n.p.: Jiaotongbu kanxing [交通部刊行], 1946).
78 Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
3
Radical Machines
The machine must then produce, not letters, not parts of words, but complete words at each stroke.
—Devello Sheffield, 1897
I realized at the very beginning that the design must be fundamentally and radically different from any of the existing American typewriters. Any such idea as providing one key for each character was little short of absurdity.
—Zhou Houkun, 1915
One decade after its first appearance, Christopher Latham Sholes’s invention began to circle the globe, transported and adapted for non-English languages by typewriter companies such as Remington and Underwood. As we saw in chapter 1, these encounters with Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Mongolian, Burmese, and many other non-Latin scripts led typewriter engineers and entrepreneurs to focus their energy on making the minimum number of necessary modifications to the original, English-language device so as to bring these orthographies within the compass of Western typewriting technology. As the device stretched to absorb these writing systems and their particular qualities—the right-to-left orientation of Hebrew or the orthographic variation of Arabic letters, for example—there was one market that remained frustratingly elusive: China. Because Chinese characters were nonalphabetic, engineers at Remington and elsewhere found themselves conceptually ill-equipped to solve the “problem” of Chinese typewriting by means of selective mechanical adjustments, the way they had with more than one hundred other languages. Try as they might, Chinese was never enveloped into the broader history of these Western multinational corporations.
With the globalization of the Western typewriter, the allure of this apparatus nevertheless became firmly established in China, as powerfully here as elsewhere in the world. China needed a typewriter of its own, many felt, not only because of its utility as a business appliance but as a symbol of modernity. With each passing year, it seemed as if China might soon become the only country left on earth not to possess one.1 “No Chinese Typewriters,” one article in 1912 abruptly read, driving home this increasingly matter-of-fact point. This lack of a Chinese typewriter—and more importantly, the growing conviction that the very existence of such a machine was impossible—was being harnessed by critics of the Chinese language who would see Chinese characters abolished altogether. To build a Chinese typewriter, then, would achieve much more than simply bringing Chinese business practices up to speed; in the ongoing trial against Chinese script, such a machine would constitute irrefutable evidence that Chinese was compatible with modernity.
To build this key piece of evidence would not be simple, however. As examined earlier, the conventional, shift-keyboard typewriter was poorly equipped to handle Chinese—a fact that, as we also saw, was blamed on Chinese writing itself, rather than on the machine. To build a “Chinese typewriter,” then, would require engineers, designers, linguists, and entrepreneurs to depart from the conventional, Western typewriter form at a time when this form enjoyed unprecedented prestige and popularity—when more and more people worldwide believed it to be truly universal. They would need to subject the very idea of typewriting to kinds of reconceptualization that Remington and other companies were unwilling, and perhaps unable, to do. In a very real sense, they would need to rescue typewriting from the monoculture of single-shift keyboard machines, either by resurrecting earlier, forgotten forms of typewriters, or perhaps by inventing new types of typewriters altogether. In their effort to bring China into the age of technolinguistic modernity, then, such “Chinese language reformers” were by necessity “typewriter reformers” as well.
This kind of thoroughgoing reimagination posed risks, however. On the one hand, if in the pursuit of Chinese typewriting Chinese script were transformed beyond recognition, in what sense would the resulting machine be a Chinese typewriter at all? In 1913, a contributor to the Chinese Students’ Monthly voiced an impassioned rejection of the abolitionist argument, but also a cautionary word against those who would prioritize the pursuit of modern information technologies at the expense of Chinese script.2 “Many foreigners as well as a few extreme types of the mission educated Chinese,” the author explained, “are in favor of a fundamental change in the Chinese language.” Such individuals called for the abolition of Chinese writing, and perhaps even its substitution with English, “giving as one of the reasons that a typewriter cannot now be invented to suit the Chinese script.” The author continued:
We Chinese wish to say that the privilege of a mere typewriter is not tempting enough to make us throw into waste our 4000 years of superb classics, literature and history. The typewriter was invented to suit the English language, not the English language the typewriter.
While the “materialistic education of the West has taught many a young Chinese to judge everything by its earning capacity,” the article inveighed, “we hope that they will not judge the value of their own civilization in the same way. … They must not forget that the preservation of the national language, which is the life and soul of a nation, is among the first things to which they should dedicate their service and devotion.”3
There was a Charybdis to this Scylla, moreover. If, in the pursuit of Chinese typewriting, the machine itself were transformed beyond all recognition, in what sense would the resulting device be a Chinese typewriter? Inventors knew full well that their machines could not hope to mimic a Remington or Underwood, and yet they were also well aware that the West and its typewriter would remain, to some extent, the judge-in-absentia of their efforts. Phrased differently: If the “typewriter” as understood in the West (and by this point in much of the rest of the world) could not be “adopted” in China in any
straightforward way, but would instead need to be critically reimagined, might not the resulting machine prove entirely illegible and unrecognizable to the Western eye? And if unrecognizable to the world as a typewriter, would it be a “typewriter” at all? Such were the questions confronting those who sought to bring Chinese into the new age of technolinguistic modernity.
The Amanuensis Machine: Devello Sheffield and the First Chinese Typewriter
O.D. Flox could hardly have known what to expect when he boarded a small vessel bound for Tongzhou at the northern terminus of the old Grand Canal. He was a member of the Western Civilization Union, an organization based in the United States whose stated aim was to “improve the social condition of men in heathen lands by introducing every variety of labour-saving machines,” and he had learned of an American inventor who perhaps held the key to just such a machine: a typewriter for the Chinese language.4 “The idea of a Chinese type-writer,” he speculated, “the object of which was to save men from going crazy over the attempt to memorize the bewildering mass of hooks and crooks in Chinese characters, seemed to me to be a bold and original one.”5
O.D. Flox’s voyage had been prompted by a pair of intriguing articles appearing in the Chinese Times. Entitled “A Chinese Type-writer,” the first appeared in January 1888 and reported briefly but glowingly on the American inventor and his device. “It is a marvel in the aid which it affords a foreigner in rapidly writing in beautiful clear characters,” the article read. “It is astonishing how rapidly you learn and settle your doubt about characters and tones. … You are learning like a child with its alphabet blocks, while at the same time you may be communicating with a Chinese friends [sic] or composing a book.”6
The second report struck a different tone. In a March 17 letter to the editor, facetiously titled “That Chinese Type-writer,” Henry C. Newcomb of the Islands’ Syndicate for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge expressed sharp doubts as to the supposed achievement of the American’s contrivance, relaying word of an unnamed “friend” who had paid a personal visit to the inventor’s studio. “His type came to hand in huge bundles nearly a cubic foot in size,” the letter continued, “and before the types could be used at all they must be sorted. This looks like a simple process; and so it would be indeed, if a man’s life were not limited to three-score years and ten.”7 “The fact is,” Newcomb concluded, “that this contrivance is not of much use for ordinary people, unless they have a teacher at hand to give the points.” “And if one is to have a teacher,” he continued, “why not make him do the writing in the first place? Why should one ‘keep a dog, and do his own barking’?”8
In a Heart of Darkness–like quest, Flox set out on a “minute specimen of river craft and allowed myself to be dragged by ropes for days.” When he reached Tongzhou, he found his man—but not at all as Flox expected him to be. Born on August 13, 1841, in Gainesville, New York, Devello Zelotes Sheffield served briefly as a teacher before being enlisted in the 17th New York Volunteer Infantry in the opening year of the American Civil War.9 Sheffield served in the Army of the Potomac for two years, being promoted to the rank of commissary sergeant, before being invalided home and “retaining through the rest of his days the traces of the army experiences and illnesses,” as his obituary would later recount.10 In the years to follow, missionary work—and China in particular—beckoned. “China is the field to which my attention has been especially called,” he wrote to his brother in March 1868, taking up residence in Tongzhou the following year with his young bride, Eleanor.11 To Flox, he seemed “the farthest remove from the popular idea of a missionary, who is supposed to be a well-fed easy going man, who is always careful to make frequent reports to his society of ‘progress’ in his work.” To the contrary, the five-foot-eleven Sheffield still bore the scars of a near-death encounter years earlier, when he was attacked and left for dead by a Chinese carpenter in his employ.12 “He is yet in middle life,” Flox reported, and yet “looks as lean as Pharaoh’s second herd of kine, and certainly gives no indication that his machine has thus far loaded his table with the abundant fruits of the earth.”13
The China to which the newlywed Sheffields voyaged was a fast-changing one. Only nine years prior, in October 1860, the Qing court lost the second of two swift and humiliating military conflicts with the British empire, the first having erupted two decades prior in the Opium War of 1839–1842. With China compelled to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858, multiple Chinese cities were opened as treaty ports for foreign traders, and Christian missionaries were legally authorized to expand their activities across the Qing imperium.14
At the time of Flox’s visit, Sheffield’s newly invented contrivance was not a mechanical typewriter so much as a system for rapidly inking and stamping Chinese characters. In 1886, he had crafted an experimental set of wooden stamps, drawing upon the carpentry experience he gained from his father, and no doubt aware of William Gamble’s work on the common usage Chinese type case we examined in chapter 2. Arranging his Chinese character stamps in alphabetic order, according to the Peking Syllabary—a Romanization system developed in 1859 by Sir Thomas Francis Wade—the missionary was able to locate, ink, and stamp one character at a time in rapid succession. “I found in experience,” he wrote of his method, “that I could use this system of tabulated stamps in writing as rapidly as Chinese scholars usually write their characters, and for five years I employed them constantly in composition.”15
Flox portrayed Sheffield’s process in even more enthusiastic terms:
The inventor then turned to his case of type and with the proud air which may always be noticed in one who knows that by his genius he has wrung some secret from nature, he touched the characters as with the hand of magic, and whole sentences of beautiful Chinese flowed forth, the characters arranging themselves with the precision of soldiers in their ranks. On seeing this exhibition of the real merits of the machine, my eyes filled with tears of genuine emotion. I grasped the hands of the inventor and said to him, “My dear sir, you are a benefactor of the human race. The resources of the Western Civilization Union may be depended upon for introducing this beautiful machine throughout China, and we will take care that your reputation as a great inventor and as a true philanthropist is never sullied by the winds of ignorant or malevolent criticism.”16
In the same year Sheffield developed his new stamping method, he also purchased a broken-down Western-style English typewriter in the city of Tianjin, hiring a Chinese “clock-tinker” to repair it so the missionary could use it in his composition of English-language materials. “I cannot write much faster yet than with a pen,” Devello explained in a letter to his parents, “but shall soon learn to do so. The great advantage is that I can now write in the evening without fear for my eyes. This I have never done in China.”17
Sheffield’s acquisition set in motion a new quest for the missionary: to devise a “similar” machine for writing in Chinese. Inspired by the emergence of typewriting technology in the United States, Sheffield began to ponder how he might turn his Chinese stamps into a unified, mechanical apparatus. The question remained, however, as to how such a machine was to be built, particularly given the fact that Chinese was not an alphabetic script. “In printing Western alphabetical languages,” Sheffield reasoned, “a full key-board for capitals, small letters, figures, etc., need not contain more than eighty keys to meet all possible wants in writing, and with the use of shift-keys some of the best machines are rapidly manipulated with only thirty direct keys.” He decided it was untenable, however, to outfit a Chinese machine in such a way. “This suggests the radical difficulty of adapting the Western type-writer to the Chinese language,” Sheffield had reflected, “in which each word is represented by its own ideograph.”
The Chinese Typewriter Page 18