On February 20, 1915, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco unveiled an illustrious exposition to celebrate the newly completed Panama Canal. Designed to showcase “the world’s progress in art, music, poetry, religion, philosophy, science, history, education, agriculture, mineralogy, mechanism, commerce and transportation,” the exhibition treated visitors from around the world to spectacular displays, from a 435-foot “Tower of Jewels” designed specifically for the event to an unveiling of perhaps the first steam locomotive purchased by the Southern Pacific railroad company. As he walked the grounds of the exposition, a young overseas Chinese student named Qi Xuan would have seen a miniature reproduction of Beijing’s Forbidden City, and perhaps walked past the Japanese exhibit and its presentation of Formosan tea and Japanese girls in traditional garb. He would have likely walked past the “Underground China” display, as well, with its seedy portrayal of opium dens, gambling, and prostitution, and perhaps also the ostentatious Underwood typewriter display and its oversized, 28,000-pound typewriter in the Palace of Liberal Arts (heralded by the company as “The Machine You Will Eventually Buy”).74 After circumambulating the grounds, though, the young Qi would no doubt have found himself quickly back at the exhibit he had come to San Francisco to man, and the invention he had come to showcase: a typewriter for the Chinese language.75
Very little is known about Qi Xuan, save what we are able to piece together from the scattered traces he left behind during his American journey.76 Born on August 1, 1890, near the city of Fuzhou in southeastern China, he graduated from the Anglo-Chinese College in 1911, just months before the outbreak of the revolution that brought the Qing dynasty to an end.77 Qi soon traveled to London, where he undertook nine months of study during the 1913–1914 academic year. The twenty-three-year-old Qi arrived in New York in February 1914, and when interviewed by the customs agent, announced his intention to study at Princeton University. His plans did not materialize, evidently, although he managed to land safely at New York University.
At NYU, Qi began work on his new model of Chinese typewriter during the 1914–1915 academic year, receiving a measure of financial support from the Chinese Consul General Yang Yuying, and likely technical support from a young NYU engineering professor, William Remington Bryans.78 Optimistic and driven, the young Qi hoped to complete and secure support for his invention before his competitor Zhou Houkun did at MIT.
Like so many of the machines in our story, the prototype of Qi Xuan’s does not survive. By closely analyzing Qi’s United States patent, however, as well as one of the surviving photographs of the young inventor, we can learn a great deal (figure 3.4). Like Zhou Houkun’s common usage typewriter, Qi Xuan’s machine also featured a cylinder encased in a copper plate, upon which were etched 4,200 common usage Chinese characters. And like Zhou’s device, Qi Xuan’s machine was a “typewriter with no keys.” The machine had only three mechanisms: a backspace, a space bar, and the lever to initiate the type mechanism. To type one of the common usage characters, the operator would rotate the cylinder by hand, bring the desired character into the striking position, and depress the typing key to imprint the character form on the page.
3.4 Qi Xuan and his typewriter
While this description of Qi’s machine suggests an identical design to that of Zhou Houkun, there was one profound difference. In addition to the 4,200 common usage characters on his cylinder, Qi also included a set of 1,327 pieces of Chinese characters that the operator could use to assemble or “spell” out less frequent characters piece by piece, in a manner akin to composing an English-language word letter by letter.79 Central to Qi’s design, then, was the same quasi-alphabetic reconceptualization of Chinese characters we saw in the context of nineteenth-century divisible type printing. Like Pauthier, Legrand, and others before him, Qi set out to decompose characters so as to render them amenable to what can be thought of as “shape-spelling”—conceptualizing “radicals” as China’s orthographic analog to the alphabetic letters of other world languages. Quite importantly, it was the identification and design of these “pieces” that constituted the focus of Qi’s patent application, far more than the mechanism itself. “My invention relates to a system,” the inventor explained, “of arranging and separating certain Chinese characters into new and novel radicals, and combining said radicals to form various words, and to a machine capable of carrying out not only the system devised by me, but also the separation and combination of the radicals forming the Chinese characters now in use.”80
Like his predecessors, Qi Xuan also departed from the conventional set of 214 character components of the Kangxi Dictionary that had formed the taxonomic basis of Chinese dictionaries, indexes, catalogs, and retrieval systems for centuries. To transform Chinese radicals from taxonomic rubrics into productive modular forms, he would need to determine the precise number of variants necessary for his machine to produce all possible Chinese characters. Although we have no indication of whether Qi Xuan was familiar with the work of Legrand, Beyerhaus, and Gamble before him, the similarities were unmistakable: 1,327 components on Qi’s typewriter, as compared to the 1,399 divisible type in the Beyerhaus font.
For all the continuities that linked Qi Xuan’s approach to those of his nineteenth-century predecessors, however, there were marked differences. Notably, the transition of combinatorialism from typography to typewriting exacerbated the spatial politics of divisible type examined in the preceding chapter. In contrast to the divisible type operator, who at the very least had been able to assemble characters in advance and transfer them as a locked form to the chase bed, combinatorial typewriting necessarily took place in a sequence, the interstices within which becoming places of potential error. As part of the mechanism of the typewriter, the modules on Qi’s device were all “moving parts,” a subtle yet profound change that could only have increased the margin of locational error.
3.5 Qi Xuan United States patent
Qi’s patent application also reveals important aesthetic shifts at play within the combinatorial approach. Whereas Pauthier and Legrand had attempted to design their divisible type system such that it would conceal as fully as possible all evidence of the principles upon which it was based—their goal, as we recall, was “to solve the problem of representing the figurative language of China, with the fewest possible elements, without, however, altering the composition of the symbols”81—Qi Xuan’s writings were far less anxiety-ridden about adhering to the dictates of Chinese calligraphic beauty. In his patent documents, the mechanical quality of his sample characters was unmistakable, each described using mathematical formulas that emphasized their status as epiphenomenal effects rather than “irresolvable individuals”—to invoke Devello Sheffield’s parlance. Through the lens of Qi’s machine, the character yu (宇) was not primarily a semantic-formal-phonetic complex signifying “eave, house, or universe,” but the outcome of a simple additive process Qi expressed as “3+4” (where 3 referred to 宀 and 4 referred to 于). Similarly, what Qi expressed as “2+5” produced the effect of miao (苗, signifying “sprout”) by the combination of 艹 and 田. Perhaps counterintuitively, then, it was not Pauthier, Legrand, or other cultural “outsiders” but rather Qi as a cultural “insider” who exhibited greater willingness to depart from conventional notions of beauty and to embrace the machinic qualities of the divisibly typed Chinese character. During the first half of the twentieth century, moreover, Qi Xuan’s experiment would be far from the last—or the most extreme—embrace of these new machinic aesthetics. In Maine, a scholar of Greek philosophy patented a Chinese typewriter of his own design, despite being unable to read or speak the language. Based on a set of geometric shapes—or “values” as the inventor Robert Brumbaugh referred to them—the typewriter would enable an operator to compose Chinese characters by means of successive impressions made upon a static, non-advancing platen (figure 3.6).82 In Hong Kong, Wang Kuoyee patented yet another combinatorial Chinese typewriter, this one replacing strokes and radicals with a do
t-matrix-esque system in which the operator used typewriter keys to create graphic representations of Chinese characters by populating a 13 × 17 grid with small circular dots (figure 3.7).83
3.6 Figure from Robert Brumbaugh patent application (filed 1946, patented 1950)
3.7 Figure of the character hua (華 “China”) from Wang Kuoyee patent application (1948)
The seismic shift we see in the work of Qi Xuan and others in the first half of the twentieth century must be read in light of the era’s sweeping cultural iconoclasm, a trend marked in many circles by an interrogation if not outright rejection of “traditional” aesthetics and orthography. One need only peruse the bold, even startling new Chinese advertising and display fonts that began to appear in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to appreciate the powerful aesthetic transformations then underway. To be sure, amid the innumerable new “-isms” of the day—modern-ism, real-ism, expression-ism, anarch-ism, Marx-ism, social-ism, commun-ism, femin-ism, fasc-ism, and more—surely one of the most powerful was that of mechan-ism: an embrace of new “visual logics” of mechanistic rationality.84 With the rapid development of Chinese print capitalism, moreover, as well as the rise of high modernist experimental typography elsewhere in the world, Chinese publishers and advertisers deployed stunning and often radically stylized Chinese fonts to catch the eye of a new, self-styled class of urbanites and cosmopolitans.85 It would seem that the aesthetic politics of divisible type printing—a politics Pauthier and Legrand attempted to overcome by subordinating their new technology as much as possible to the logic of Chinese orthographic aesthetics—might in Qi Xuan’s era be resolving itself, now that this aesthetic logic was at least in part becoming subordinated to technology.
On March 21, 1915, in New York, Qi Xuan delivered the first known presentation of his machine to journalists, as well as to his supporter, Consul General Yang Yuying.86 The New York Times dispatched a journalist to the young student’s apartment on the Upper West Side, near the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and 115th Street.87 Here the complex challenges of combinatorial typewriting were laid bare. As reported in the following day’s article, Consul General Yang performed something of a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the event, using Qi’s apparatus to type a letter to the Chinese minister in Washington—to spell Chinese characters using these more than 1,300 components.88 Although the letter contained only one hundred characters, it took Yang approximately two hours to complete—a fact in which the newspaper report clearly delighted. Qi Xuan attempted to explain to the journalist the reasons for this poor performance, contending that “this slow speed was due to the unfamiliarity of the operator with the characters.”89 “The inventor believes that with practice a speed of 40 words a minute may be obtained,” the article continued, “which is quite good for Chinese.” The damage had been done, however. When the article posted the following morning, any hope of attracting the interest of manufacturers would arguably have evaporated, effectively bringing an end to the young inventor’s foray into the world of typewriting. We can only surmise the mixture of conflicted and competing feelings Qi may have experienced when reading the article’s extensive title: “4,200 Characters on New Typewriter; Chinese Machine Has Only Three Keys, but There Are 50,000 Combinations. 100 Words in TWO HOURS. Heuen Chi, New York University Student, Patents Device Called the First of Its Kind.”90
Like the title itself, the article oscillated between moments of praise (e.g., lauding the young inventor’s intellectual pedigree) and denigration (comparing his machine to the “little tin typewriters made for children’s toys”).91 Its overall tone was one of tragic comedy—of a talented young Chinese student led down a fruitless path by his own quixotic ambitions. Once the narrative of Qi’s machine entered the public realm, moreover, it began to circulate more broadly. The same condescending tone pervaded media accounts in the years following, as in a 1917 article in the Washington Post announcing a newly patented model of Chinese typewriter (most likely Qi Xuan’s machine). Entitled “The Newest Inventions,” the article tellingly placed the new machine alongside such absurdities as a “dancing radiator doll” and “a mouse trap for burglars.”92
What Will Chinese Writing Be?
By the year 1915, China was no longer a country in search of a typewriter. To the contrary, there now existed two types of Chinese typewriter, each putting forth a different approach to the question of Chinese technolinguistic modernity, and each departing dramatically from the Western typewriter form. Manufacturers in China and abroad would now have to choose between them—to decide which, if either, constituted a promising path forward. The common usage approach to Chinese typewriting tapped into widespread concerns and longstanding research among Chinese elites into the question of the “foundational” vocabulary of a modern Chinese citizenry, and in that sense could perhaps render this machine understandable and comprehensible to customers already familiar with the notion of “common usage” in other contexts. Yet the common usage approach could never hope to encompass the entirety of the Chinese language, which for an inscription device meant something quite different than in the context of Chinese-language pedagogy. To learn and memorize a core set of “foundational characters” in no way prevented a student from eventually expanding beyond those lexical boundaries, whereas in the case of the typewriter, common usage formed a more or less impassable horizon. In this respect, modern Chinese information technologies premised upon the common usage model would necessarily be marked by an irresolvable restlessness, with elites, educators, and entrepreneurs forever battling one another over the authority to define the boundaries separating first- and second-class characters, and the boundaries separating which characters to include and which to banish. The price of technolinguistic modernity so conceived would be that of division, restlessness, and the constant policing of boundaries.
Qi Xuan and his divisible type machine put forth a strikingly different answer to the question of Chinese writing. In contrast to the common usage model, this machine offered up a vision of modern Chinese inscription that would embrace frequent and infrequent characters alike, quieting the mania and incessant lexical self-improvement of common usage systems, and thereby unifying the Chinese script within a new technolinguistic domain. But technolinguistic modernity of this variety would come with its own compromise, as well. To achieve this unity and “leave no character behind,” it would first be necessary to shatter Chinese characters into pieces, giving up on the idea that characters—and even the beloved brushstroke—constituted the ontological foundation of Chinese writing. Instead, both strokes and characters would have to cede the throne to “the radical,” the once taxonomic and etymological entity now reimagined as the productive “root” of Chinese writing itself. This ontological revolution necessarily brought with it a politics over which the common usage model never had to fret: the politics of Chinese aesthetics in the age of mechanical reproduction.
In this competition over the future of Chinese script, Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan did not escape the attention of language reformers and entrepreneurs in China, moreover.93 Hu Shi, the towering figure of the nascent New Culture Movement, witnessed Zhou Houkun’s invention in person during his travels to Boston, and heard about Qi Xuan’s machine through media reports. Seizing upon their inventions, Hu authored an indictment of the abolitionist position. “Our country has some arrogant students,” Hu wrote, “ones who go so far as to recommend throwing out Chinese and replacing it with English, or using simplified characters.” Hu continued:
They say that Chinese doesn’t fit the typewriter, and thus that it’s inconvenient. Typewriters, however, are created for the purpose of language. Chinese characters were not made for the purpose of typewriters. To say that we should throw away Chinese characters because they don’t fit the typewriter is like “cutting off one’s toes to fit the shoe,” only infinitely more absurd.
Hu Shi was not the only one to take notice of the work by Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan. “Few people conceive of the possibility of inventin
g a typewriter for the Chinese written language, which is not alphabetic,” C.C. Chang wrote in 1915, immediately upon viewing Qi Xuan’s combinatorial device. “The success of Heun Chi [Qi Xuan] of New York University in devising a machine for the Chinese language definitely proves this possibility and opens the way to further invention and improvements along this line.”94
Perhaps most importantly, both Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan caught the attention of Zhang Yuanji (1867–1959), president of the most important center of print capitalism in China at the time—Commercial Press in Shanghai. In Zhang’s diaries, the first mention of Zhou Houkun came in March of 1916, just after Zhou had returned to China from the United States. On May 16 of the same year, Zhang recorded a brief entry about Qi Xuan as well, commenting on second-hand reports of Qi’s apparatus. Apparently, Zhang noted, it produced Chinese characters of reasonable quality and as a typewriter might surpass that of Zhou Houkun.95
Zhou Houkun and Qi Xuan were well aware of each other’s work, as well. Indeed, before manufacturers in China had decided where to invest their resources, this pair of young entrepreneurs set out in a public debate over the merits of their respective approaches. Zhou was the first to strike. In “The Problem of a Typewriter for the Chinese Language,” a piece from 1915 in which Zhou both introduced his machine and disparaged his competitor’s, he adopted a discursive strategy identical to those we saw in chapter 1.96 To assert the impracticality of a combinatorial Chinese typewriter, Zhou began by emphasizing the type of morphological, scalar, and positional variation that took place within Chinese radicals—all in an effort to prove the impossibility of his competitor’s idea. As there were four different sizes, shapes, and locations in which a radical might appear—for a total of sixty-four possibilities (four to the third power)—one would in fact need to multiply the total number of radicals—roughly two hundred—by this total number of possible varieties. As Zhou explained, one was left with the absurd proposition of a keyboard requiring no fewer than 12,800 keys.97 “Many men went about the problem by attempting to resolve the Chinese characters into ‘radicals,’” Zhou concluded. He continued:
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