This monster machine is a Chinese typewriter, circa 1970, on display at the CCCB cultural center in Barcelona, Spain. Sadly, the exhibition is not full of these kinds of crazy gadgets, although there is a kick ass scale model of Beijing, but this amazing contraption is enough on its own. Intrigued by the machine, and disappointed by the lack of documentation, I decided to do some digging.
The only part that resembles a QWERTY typewriter is the rubber roller at the back. From there, things quickly become absurd. Take a close look and you’ll see that the flat bed is in fact full of tiny metal symbols, similar to a letter case used for traditional typesetting.
In that case there are a couple of thousand characters, and other cases can be swapped in as needed. You’ll notice that there’s no keyboard — instead, the operator uses the levers to line up a kind of grabber over the required letter. Then he hits a switch and the letter is moved up to the paper and the letter printed. Slow? Very. Apparently a good typist averages just 20 characters per minute.
There have been improvements. A later design uses a "magic eye" and real keys to speed things up. The "Mingkwai" (clear and quick) invented in the 1940s by Chinese author Lin Yutang, had 72 keys and could print a stunning 90,000 words. The picture at right, from the November 1947 issue of popular mechanics, shows it in action.
To choose a letter, you press two buttons together, each of which chooses from a bank of images which represent the top or the bottom of a character. The "magic eye" is a magnifier which shows a preview of the letter to the typist. Hitting the keys sends one or two of the six rollers into action, which between them contain 7000 full characters and 1,400 partial characters.
And it doesn’t stop there. Foreign typefaces can be added to allow Russian or English to be printed. In this case, though, you’ll need to turn the paper sideways — Chinese is written in columns.
It doesn’t get much easier with computers, either. Because Chinese is made up of meaningful symbols instead of letters built in to words, a keyboard simply can’t contain everything without being the size of a table. To get round this two methods are commonly used. Wubi is similar to actually drawing the ideograms — the typist hits keys one by one to build up the picture from a series of strokes marked on each key. This is then translated into the correct symbol.
Better is Pinyin, which involves typing the letters phonetically in Roman letters (the ones we use). The computer then translates these into symbols. This is still something of a pain, but short of dropping their entire alphabet, what are the Chinese to do.
As an aside, there is one thing about written chinese that is immensely useful. Although the many Chinese dialects are mutually incomprhensible, when written they are exactly same and understandable by the speaker of any Chinese language. Think of them as being like western numbers. Both a Frenchman and and Englishman understand the number "1" when seeing it as a figure, even though both pronounce it very differently.
In the Chinese city. Perspectives on the transmutations of an Empire [CCCB]
Chinese Typwriter [Modern Mechanix]
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