The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  The idea comes natural when we see that the Chinese characters are composed of “radicals,” of which there are over two hundred. It was reasoned that by having two hundred keys to which are attached two hundred types of the “radicals,” they can produce a machine on the same principle as the American Typewriters, which will be able to print any character by the combination of these “radicals.” The scheme looked well on the face of it; but they forgot, that the same “radical” in different characters differs not only in size but also in shape, and, furthermore, they occupy different positions in a character.98

  Zhou’s criticism of Qi Xuan’s machine was predicated upon feigned ignorance if not purposefully misleading language. Qi’s machine was combinatorial, indeed, but it did not encompass 12,800 keys—nor even a keyboard, a fact that Zhou would undoubtedly have known. Zhou would also have known, given his extensive work on the Chinese language, that the level of variation among Chinese radicals did not approach anything like his “four-cubed” equation. As evidenced in the work of divisible type printers, and by Qi Xuan’s own patent documents, the number of variant radicals required did not exceed 2,200—less than the total number of characters on Zhou’s common usage device.

  Qi Xuan wasted no time in mounting a response to Zhou’s attack. “Not in the least boasting of my own success,” Qi protested, “I should say frankly that my device is the only yet known practical and scientific method of making a typewriting machine for our mother-tongue—that is to split the characters into ‘radicals’ in such a way as to be able to make by combination, words equal in size and proper in form.”99 He took aim at Zhou’s arithmetic, offering up the possibility to his readers that Zhou had simply erred in this most basic of multiplication problems. “Well, Mr. Chow certainly has a good memory of some algebraic law,” Qi insinuated bitingly, “but I am sorry to say that he has unfortunately misapplied it, so that he is discouraged from proceeding further along the correct path by the startling figure of 12,800!”100 “Therefore, I venture to conclude that Mr. Chow appears either to lack sufficient mechanical knowledge or intelligent study of the ‘radical system,’ although he writes as if he were a great authority on the problem of Chinese typewriter invention.”101 At this point, Qi Xuan returned fire against Zhou’s machine itself. “I cannot help thinking,” Qi wondered aloud about all common usage machines, “that their inventions are merely ‘imperfect printing press machine’ [sic], which has little mechanical advantage and commercial value.”102

  Ultimately, however, it was Zhou Houkun who prevailed in this struggle. Whether because of his more active self-promotion, or because the design of his machine was premised upon common usage—an approach with a longer pedigree in China than that of combinatorialism—Zhou captured the lion’s share of attention by companies back in China, most notably Commercial Press. Meanwhile, information about Qi Xuan’s device was far sparser and less reliable. An article from the Chinese press in 1915, for example, even mistook Qi Xuan’s name, reversing and mistranscribing it to read “Xuan Qi” [宣奇]—all of which suggests that many of the first introductions to Qi Xuan in China were being filtered through the English-language, American press.103 Zhang Yuanji himself was not even clear about the inventor’s name, miswriting Qi Xuan’s name in his diaries as late as 1919.

  Commercial Press established an initial working relationship to bring the bright young MIT graduate and his common usage device into the company. Zhou Houkun had been on his way to Nanjing, to head a newly formed industrial institute at Nanjing Normal College, but his term of employment would not commence until July. Taking advantage of this gap, Commercial Press succeeded in bringing Zhou and his typewriter to Shanghai, to begin overseeing the machine’s development and manufacture.104 To this new venture they lent their considerable reputation and expertise, vying to become the company that would succeed where global giants like Remington and Underwood had failed: to produce and sell a mass-manufactured typewriter for the Chinese market.

  At long last, China would have its typewriter.

  Notes

  1 “No Chinese Typewriters,” Gregg Writer 15 (1912): 382.

  2 “Judging Eastern Things from Western Point of View,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 8, no. 3 (1913): 154.

  3 “Judging Eastern Things from Western Point of View,” 154.

  4 O.D. Flox, “That Chinese Type-Writer: An Open Letter to the Hon. Henry C. Newcomb, Agent of the Faroe Islands’ Syndicate for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge,” Chinese Times (March 31, 1888), 199.

  5 Ibid.

  6 “A Chinese Type-Writer,” Chinese Times (January 7, 1888), 6.

  7 Henry C. Newcomb, “Letter to the Editor: That Chinese Type-writer,” Chinese Times [Tianjin] (March 17, 1888), 171–172.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Passport Applications January 2, 1906–March 31, 1925, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, ARC identifier 583830, MLR, number A1534, NARA Series M1490, roll 109.

  10 A.H. Smith, “In Memoriam, Dr. Devello Z. Sheffield,” Chinese Recorder (September 1913), 564–568, 565. See also Stephan P. Clarke, “The Remarkable Sheffield Family of North Gainesville” (n.p., n.d.), 3, manuscript provided by Stephan Clarke to the author.

  11 “Missionaries of the American Board,” Congregationalist (September 26, 1872), 3. See also Roberto Paterno, “Devello Z. Sheffield and the Founding of the North China College,” in American Missionaries in China, ed. Kwang-ching Liu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1966), 42–92. Eleanor Sherrill Sheffield was educated at Pike Seminary. See Clarke, “The Remarkable Sheffield Family of North Gainesville.”

  12 “Child of the Quarantine: One More Passenger on the Nippon Maru List—Baby Born During Angel Island Stay,” San Francisco Chronicle (July 11, 1899), 12; Smith, “In Memoriam, Dr. Devello Z. Sheffield,” 568.

  13 Flox, “That Chinese Type-Writer,” 199.

  14 The treaty also expanded foreign navigation rights along the Yangtze River, allowed four Western powers to station legations in Beijing, and prohibited the use of the term yi—glossed in English as “barbarian”—in Chinese governmental records and correspondence in reference to the British and other foreign nationals. Devello and Eleanor raised five children, the first four of whom were born in Tongzhou: Alfred (1871–1961), John (1873–1874), Mary (1875–1961), Flora (1877–1975), and Carolyn (1880–1962). See Clarke, “The Remarkable Sheffield Family of North Gainesville,” 14.

  15 Devello Z. Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” in Actes du onzième Congrès International des Orientalistes, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1898), 51.

  16 Flox, “That Chinese Type-Writer,” 199.

  17 Letter from Devello Sheffield to his parents, January 27, 1886. Devello Z. Sheffield and Family Letters & Photographs (Ruth S. Johnson Family Collection).

  18 Devello Z. Sheffield [謝衛樓], Shendao yaolun 神道要論 [Important Doctrines of Theology] (Tongzhou: Tongzhou wenkui qikan yin 通州文魁齊刊印, 1894).

  19 Devello Z. Sheffield [謝衛樓], “Di’er zhang minshou youhuo weibei huangdi [第二章民受誘惑違背皇帝],” Xiao hai yuebao [小孩月報] 4, no. 3 (1878): 5; Devello Z. Sheffield [謝衛樓], “Diba zhang taizi duanding liangmin de baoying [第八章太子斷定良民的報應],” Xiao hai yuebao 5, no. 2 (1879): 2–3; Devello Z. Sheffield [謝衛樓], “Shangfa yuyan diliu zhang liangmin quanren fangzhan huigai [賞罰喻言第六章良民勸人放瞻悔改],” Xiao hai yuebao [小孩月報] 4, no. 10 (1879): 5; Devello Z. Sheffield [謝衛樓], “Shangfa yuyan disan zhang minshou youhuo fanzui geng shen [賞罰喻言第三章島民受誘惑犯罪更深],” Xiao hai yuebao [小孩月報] 4, no. 4 (1878): 6–7; Devello Z. Sheffield, [謝衛樓], “Shangfa yuyan diyi zhang daomin shou bawang xiahai [賞罰喻言第一章島民受霸王轄害],” Xiao hai yuebao [小孩月報] 4, no. 2 (1878): 3.

  20 For nineteen years, from 1890 to 1909, he served as head of North China College. After a furlough in th
e United States, Sheffield returned to China in the fall of 1900, in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. He assisted in the reconstruction of North China College. A new committee had formed, charged with overseeing the revision of the New Testament in literary Chinese. The Shanghai Conference appointed Sheffield as chairman of the committee, in which role he would oversee the project through its completion seventeen years later, in 1907. Shortly thereafter, Sheffield’s tenure was extended, this time as chairman to oversee revision of the Old Testament in literary Chinese.

  21 Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” 63.

  22 Ibid., 62.

  23 Ibid., 62–63.

  24 Ibid., 63. For clerks and businesspeople, as well, such an amanuensis machine would offer no opinions or interpretations of its own, and would permit foreigners to compose and issue Chinese-language communications “with the assurance that private matters would not be divulged by his writer.” For a fascinating examination of parallel anxieties in the British imperial context, see Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1996]).

  25 Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” 62–63.

  26 Ibid., 63.

  27 Ibid., 51.

  28 Ibid., 50.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Ibid., 51.

  33 Letter from Devello Sheffield to his family, December 3, 1888; letter from Devello Sheffield to his parents, January 27, 1886; Devello Z. Sheffield and Family Letters & Photographs (Ruth S. Johnson Family Collection).

  34 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 206–207.

  35 Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” 51.

  36 In the case of extremely rare characters, movable type printers were sometimes required to punch certain characters on demand. Sheffield’s machine encompassed far fewer characters than did the average Chinese printing office, however, making such recourses to extra-systemic and/or alternate modes of inscription far more common.

  37 Devello Z. Sheffield, Selected Lists of Chinese Characters, Arranged According of Frequency of their Recurrence (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1903). Sheffield evidently did not count “untabulated characters” as part of his final calculation of 4,662.

  38 Sheffield, Selected Lists of Chinese Characters. In a brief passage, Sheffield reflects as well on the wheel of his machine, which could be adjusted to include alternate Chinese characters, pertinent to other industries. Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” 63.

  39 This was not the case for Sheffield, however, who included each of these character forms on his machine, and thus clearly was treating them as separate entities.

  40 “Science and Industry,” Arkansas Democrat (October 10, 1898), 7; “China,” Atchison Daily Globe (April 11, 1898), 1; Daily Picayune-New Orleans (April 9, 1898), 4; “Our Benevolent Causes,” Southwestern Christian Advocate (July 8, 1897), 6; “Will Typewrite Chinese,” Atchison Daily Globe (June 1, 1897), 3; “Typewriter in Chinese,” Denver Evening Post (May 29, 1897), 1; “Salmis Journalier,” Milwaukee Journal (May 3, 1897), 4.

  41 Daily Picayune-New Orleans (April 19, 1898), 4.

  42 “Science and Industry,” 7.

  43 “A Chinese Typewriter,” Semi-Weekly Tribute (June 22, 1897), 16.

  44 Sheffield, “The Chinese Type-writer, Its Practicability and Value,” 60.

  45 Smith, “In Memoriam, Dr. Devello Z. Sheffield,” 565.

  46 Sheffield arrived in Honolulu on March 24, 1909, aboard the S.S. Siberia. His destination was listed as Detroit, Michigan. See “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving or Departing at Honolulu, Hawaii, 1900–1954.” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, record group 85, series/roll no. m1412:6.

  47 “Child of the Quarantine,”12.

  48. “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving or Departing at Honolulu, Hawaii, 1900–1954,” National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, record group 85, series/roll no. m1412:6.

  49 Nanyang gongxue. Elsewhere, Zhou Houkun is listed as being from Wuxi in Jiangsu province. See “MIT China (Meiguo Masheng ligong xuexiao Zhongguo) [美國麻省理工學校中國],” Shenbao (July 19, 1915), 6; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ed., University of Illinois Directory: Listing the 35,000 Persons Who Have Ever Been Connected with the Urbana-Champaign Departments, Including Officers of Instruction and Administration and 1397 Deceased (Urbana-Champaign, 1916), 118. Nanyang College (Nanyang Gongxue), built in 1896–1898, was founded by order of the Qing’s office for the development of foreign investments and telegraphic offices. Later, in 1921, it became Jiaotong Engineering University (交通大學).

  50 Other notable shipmates and fellow travelers included Zhou Ren (周仁) and Zhang Pengchun (張彭春). Hongshan Li, US-China Educational Exchange, 62–63, 65–67, 70; “Name List of Students Selected to Travel to America (Qu ding you Mei xuesheng mingdan) [取定遊美學生名單],” Shenbao (August 9, 1910), 5; “Draft Proposal regarding Students Taking Exam to Study Abroad in the United States (Kaoshi liu Mei xuesheng cao’an) [考試留美學生草案],” Shenbao (August 8, 1910), 5–6.

  51 “New Invention: A Chinese Typewriter (Zhongguo daziji zhi xin faming) [中國打字機之新發明],” Shenbao (August 16, 1915), 10; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ed., University of Illinois Directory: Listing the 35,000 Persons Who Have Ever Been Connected with the Urbana-Champaign Departments, Including Officers of Instruction and Administration and 1397 Deceased (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1916), 118.

  52 His thesis was entitled “Experimental Determination of Damping Coefficients in the Stability of Aeroplanes.” See Lauren Clark and Eric Feron, “Development of and Contribution to Aerospace Engineering at MIT,” 40th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit (January 14–17, 2002), 2; “New Invention: A Chinese Typewriter (Zhongguo daziji zhi xin faming) [中國打字機之新發明],” Shenbao (August 16, 1915), 10; “MIT China (Meiguo Masheng ligong daxue Zhongguo) [美國麻省理工大學中國],” Shenbao (July 15, 1914), 6.

  53 Zhou Houkun, “Explanation of Newly Created Chinese Typewriter (Chuangzhi Zhongguo daziji tushuo) [創制中國打字機圖說],” trans. Wang Ruding, Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi) [東方雜誌] 12, no. 10 (October 1915): 28.

  54 A Monotype machine is a form of “hot metal” composing machine, a technique of typesetting in which operators use a keyboard to set a series of type matrices, hollow molds of letters into which the machine injects molten metal which cools into type slugs. Unlike earlier techniques of movable type printing, in which type setting and type founding constituted two separate processes, hot metal composing machines merged these processes into single devices. Monotype machines created injection-mold letters one by one, hence the name mono-type; while Linotype machines cast letters in the form of bars or lines of type. Hot metal composing marked an epoch in the history of print, replacing and bringing to an end the age of industrial-scale movable type printing made famous by Johannes Gutenberg and his descendants.

  55 Here we see the continuation of late Qing reformers examined by Tze-ki Hon and others. As Hon phrases it, these late Qing participants in Chinese pedagogical reforms “realized that they were the ‘educator of citizens,’ participating in nation-building by forging a collective identity among young Chinese.” See Tze-Ki Hon, “Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks,” in The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China, ed. Tze-ki Hon and Robert Culp (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 81.

  56 Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village Chi
na (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 40–41.

  57 George Kennedy, “A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese,” Modern Language Journal 21, no. 8 (May 1937): 587–592, 590. The precise size of Chen’s corpus was 554,478 Chinese characters.

  58 To be precise, the 177 most frequent characters accounted for 57 percent of the entire corpus. As we recall from chapter 2, William Gamble had determined in 1861 that the thirteen most common characters in his corpus accounted for one-sixth or 16.67 percent of the whole—a number that maps on to Chen Heqin’s findings rather well. As we move out along both scholars’ frequency curves, the fit becomes even tighter. In Gamble’s analysis, the first 521 characters accounted for nine-elevenths (or 81.8 percent) of the whole. In Chen’s analysis, the first 569 characters accounted for 80 percent of the whole.

  59 Hayford, To the People, 60.

  60 Ibid., 44.

  61 Ibid., 50. Westerners were also concerned with this, but we will not focus on this community of practitioners. See, for example, William Edward Soothill, Student’s Four Thousand 字 and General Pocket Dictionary, 6th ed. (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1908), v. See also Courtenay Hughes Fenn, The Five Thousand Dictionary, rev. American ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), based on 5th Peking ed., which included additions and revisions by George D. Wilder, B.A., D.D., and Mr. Chin Hsien Tseng, eleventh printing.

  62 Hayford, To the People, 48.

  63 Ibid., 45. With the growth of mass education movements, algorithmic reading became a kind of pedagogical cottage industry. Competing parties put forth their own proprietary visions of “minimum Chinese.” The National Association for the Advancement of Mass Education later published another list, this one targeted at farming communities. See National Association for the Advancement of Mass Education (Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui) [中華平民教育促進會], ed., Farmer’s One Thousand Character Textbook (Nongmin qianzi ke) [農民千字課] (n.p., 1933), Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Papers of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, MS COLL/IIRR; and Universal Word List for the Average Citizen (Ping guomin tongyong cibiao) [平國民通用詞表], Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Papers of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, MS COLL/IIRR, n.d.