Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters, ? letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals, and a handful of other symbols.Ī publicity photo of Kao Chung-Chin’s invention. Spinning continuously at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, or once per second, the drum measured 7 inches in diameter, and 11 inches in length. ?”Įach four-digit code corresponded with a character etched on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Just as the film explained, “if you want to type word number 4862 you would press 4-8-6-2 and the machine would type the right character. To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys-one from each bank-more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5 0 through 9 0 through 9 and 0 through 9. The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine-not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language? My office was becoming something of a private museum.Īs I thought, I’d encountered the typist previously in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines. By that point, I had amassed a large and still-growing body of source materials, including archival documents, historic photographs, and even antique machines. I’m a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, and I was years into a book project on the history of modern Chinese information technology-and the Chinese typewriter specifically. As soon as I saw that film, I began to riffle through my files.
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