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Chinese typewriter
Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters. Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, following the invention of the Japanese typewriter by Kyota Sugimoto, which used kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system. At least sixty different models of Chinese typewriter have been produced, ranging from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors.
A mechanical engineer from Wuxi, Jiangsu, named Zhou Houkun (Hou-Kun Chow; 周厚坤; b. 1887) co-invented the first mass-produced Chinese typewriter. As a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zhou first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter while inspecting American models in Boston. His initial efforts were hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai.
Zhou considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for each character. Instead, his design involved a revolving cylinder that contained the characters ordered by radical and stroke count, like in a Chinese dictionary. Zhou completed an initial prototype in 1914, and by 1916 he had attracted interest from the media and potential manufacturers. However, his design was heavy at 18 kg (40 lb), which was later reduced to about 14 kg (31 lb). The Commercial Press had obtained the rights to his machine and possession of the prototype by 1919. Following improvements to the design by an engineer working for the Commercial Press named Shu Changyu (舒昌鈺), which included replacing the cylinder with a flat bed customizable by typists, the model entered mass production in 1919.
Zhou expected his typewriter to be used in Chinese offices where multiple copies of documents would have to be made, and by Chinese living in foreign countries without access to skilled writers of Chinese.
On 28 June 1944, IBM engineer Chung-Chin Kao (高仲芹; b. 1906) applied for a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for his invention, the first electric Chinese typewriter, and received US patent number 2412777 on 17 December 1946. The typewriter employed 36 keys divided into four banks: the first was numbered 0 through 5, and the other three were numbered 0 through 9. To type a character, the operator simultaneously pressed one key from each bank. Each four-digit combination corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, punctuation marks, numerals, letters of the English alphabet and other symbols etched onto a revolving drum which had a diameter of seven inches and a length of 11 inches. The drum made a complete revolution once per second, allowing the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute.
Kao's typewriter received extensive attention in its debut in a 1947 tour of China. Accompanied by Lois Lew, one of the few Chinese-speaking typists at the time, Kao was greeted by the mayor of Shanghai in 1947 before their first series of demonstrations at the IBM Chinese headquarters, and by government officials in Nanjing where 3,000 people watched a demonstration. Kao's typewriter was also featured in a 1947 documentary with other office business machines.
The IBM Chinese typewriter was not successfully put on the market because of its impractical nature. As a July 15, 1946 Time article wrote, "it takes two months for an operator to learn to write simple sentences, four months to achieve the machine's top speed—45 words a minute (par for a fast typist in English: 120 words)." The economic impact of the 1949 Communist takeover of China also worsened sales.
Chinese typewriters made in Japan entered the market in the 1920s, with the Wanneng (万能) brand, introduced by the Nippon Typewriter Company in 1940 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, becoming the de facto standard. After Japan's defeat and the subsequent nationalization of typewriter companies by the Communist government, locally made models based on the Wanneng continued to dominate the market, particularly the Double Pigeon (双鸽; Shuānggē).
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Chinese typewriter AI simulator
(@Chinese typewriter_simulator)
Chinese typewriter
Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters. Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, following the invention of the Japanese typewriter by Kyota Sugimoto, which used kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system. At least sixty different models of Chinese typewriter have been produced, ranging from sizable mechanical models to electronic word processors.
A mechanical engineer from Wuxi, Jiangsu, named Zhou Houkun (Hou-Kun Chow; 周厚坤; b. 1887) co-invented the first mass-produced Chinese typewriter. As a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Zhou first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter while inspecting American models in Boston. His initial efforts were hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai.
Zhou considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for each character. Instead, his design involved a revolving cylinder that contained the characters ordered by radical and stroke count, like in a Chinese dictionary. Zhou completed an initial prototype in 1914, and by 1916 he had attracted interest from the media and potential manufacturers. However, his design was heavy at 18 kg (40 lb), which was later reduced to about 14 kg (31 lb). The Commercial Press had obtained the rights to his machine and possession of the prototype by 1919. Following improvements to the design by an engineer working for the Commercial Press named Shu Changyu (舒昌鈺), which included replacing the cylinder with a flat bed customizable by typists, the model entered mass production in 1919.
Zhou expected his typewriter to be used in Chinese offices where multiple copies of documents would have to be made, and by Chinese living in foreign countries without access to skilled writers of Chinese.
On 28 June 1944, IBM engineer Chung-Chin Kao (高仲芹; b. 1906) applied for a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for his invention, the first electric Chinese typewriter, and received US patent number 2412777 on 17 December 1946. The typewriter employed 36 keys divided into four banks: the first was numbered 0 through 5, and the other three were numbered 0 through 9. To type a character, the operator simultaneously pressed one key from each bank. Each four-digit combination corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, punctuation marks, numerals, letters of the English alphabet and other symbols etched onto a revolving drum which had a diameter of seven inches and a length of 11 inches. The drum made a complete revolution once per second, allowing the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute.
Kao's typewriter received extensive attention in its debut in a 1947 tour of China. Accompanied by Lois Lew, one of the few Chinese-speaking typists at the time, Kao was greeted by the mayor of Shanghai in 1947 before their first series of demonstrations at the IBM Chinese headquarters, and by government officials in Nanjing where 3,000 people watched a demonstration. Kao's typewriter was also featured in a 1947 documentary with other office business machines.
The IBM Chinese typewriter was not successfully put on the market because of its impractical nature. As a July 15, 1946 Time article wrote, "it takes two months for an operator to learn to write simple sentences, four months to achieve the machine's top speed—45 words a minute (par for a fast typist in English: 120 words)." The economic impact of the 1949 Communist takeover of China also worsened sales.
Chinese typewriters made in Japan entered the market in the 1920s, with the Wanneng (万能) brand, introduced by the Nippon Typewriter Company in 1940 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, becoming the de facto standard. After Japan's defeat and the subsequent nationalization of typewriter companies by the Communist government, locally made models based on the Wanneng continued to dominate the market, particularly the Double Pigeon (双鸽; Shuānggē).