Mullaney 2017
Mullaney, Thomas S. The Chinese Typewriter: A History. MIT Press, 2017.
Mullaney - The Chinese Typewriter A History Introduction: There is No Alphabet Here
There was a Chinese dao to match the Greek logos, one that functioned according to a two-part organizational system well known in China. In the first of these, Chinese characters are ordered according to the number of pen- or brushstrokes needed to compose them, an organizational scheme that had been a mainstay in China for centuries.
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The second level of organization is based upon a centuries-old prin- ciple of Chinese calligraphy dating back at least to the Jin dynasty callig- rapher Wang Xizhi (303–361). According to this principle, all characters in Chinese are composed of eight fundamental types of brushstrokes, ranked in a simple hierarchy: the dian (dot), heng (horizontal), shu (ver- tical), pie (left-falling diagonal), na (right-falling diagonal), tiao (rising), zhe (bending downward/rightward), and gou (hook) (figure I.2).
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…in the 1950s mainland China developed and promulgated a Latin alphabet–based phoneticization system known as Hanyu pinyin, or pinyin for short. Designed by Chinese linguists shortly after the Communist revolution of 1949, pinyin is now ubiquitous in China, functioning as a paratextual technology that runs alongside and supports character-based Chinese writing, but does not replace it. Pinyin is not a “Chinese alphabet,” thus, but China’s use of the Latin alphabet toward a variety of ends.
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Whether Morse code, braille, stenography, typewriting, Linotype, Monotype, punched-card memory, text encoding, dot matrix printing, word processing, ASCII, personal computing, optical character recognition, digital typography, or a host of other examples from the past two centuries, each of these systems was developed first with the Latin alphabet in mind, and only later “extended” to encompass non-Latin alphabets—and perhaps nonalphabetic Chinese.
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As these information technologies spread around the world, a pro- cess of globalization greatly facilitated by European colonialism and later American global dominance, they came to be viewed by many as language-agnostic, neutral, and “universal” systems—systems that worked for everyone and every tongue. In truth, however, such myths of “univer- sality” held up only to the degree that Chinese script was effaced or erased from the story.
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What name shall we give to this long history of false universalisms? Linguistic imperialism leaps to mind, and at first seems to fit the bill. The history of these encounters is inseparable, after all, from the broader his- tory of China’s engagement with Euro-American imperialism. Beginning in the nineteenth century, as we will see, Chinese script was enmeshed within a novel global information order whose infrastructure depended increasingly upon something China did not possess, and could not
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simply “adopt”: namely, an alphabet.
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The hegemony at play, then, is not primarily a matter of Occident and Orient, West and East, Roman and Exotic, or even Europe and Asia. It is not reducible to any such crude binaries. Instead, the divide is one that pits all alphabets and syllabaries against the one major world script that is neither: character-based Chinese writing. It is a new hierarchy of script that tells us: while some alphabets and syllabaries are more compatible with modernity than others, all alphabets and syllabaries can take pride in their superiority over Chinese.
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The true fault line at play here is not the West and the rest, but pleremic and cenemic. So long as a script is cenemic—a writing system in which graphemes represent meaningless, phonetic elements, based on the Greek term kenos, meaning empty—then the IOC’s claim to universal- ity stands, as will those made by the likes of Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, Mergenthaler, IBM, Adobe, and more. It is only in the case of pleremic script—writing systems like Chinese in which graphemes repre- sent meaningful segments of language, based on the Greek pl ērēs, mean- ing full—that this universalism breaks down…
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…many have argued that the coherence and persistence of the Chinese polity, civilization, and culture have in no small part been predicated upon the unifying influence of a common character-based script. Were China to go the route of phonetic writing, would not these linguistic differences in the oral realm be made more insurmountable, and politically charged, once formalized in writing? Might the elimination of character-based writing precipitate the breakup of the country along fault lines of language? Might China cease to be one country, and instead become a continent of countries, like Europe?
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The puzzle of Chinese linguistic modernity would appear, then, to be a perfectly irresolvable one. Characters held China together, but they also held China back. Characters maintained China’s connection with its past, but so too did they isolate China from the Hegelian sense of his- torical progress. How then was China to make this seemingly impossible transition?
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When we move away from the simplistic iconoclasm of character abo- litionists, an entirely new history of the Chinese language comes into focus. No longer in the realm of Confucian ethics or Daoist metaphysics, where Chinese characters were criticized by some as the very repositories of antimodern thought—as the “the very nests and lairs in which poison- ous and corrupt thoughts reside,” to pull another gem from Chen Duxiu’s abolitionist jewel box 17—we find ourselves in the admittedly less sensa- tional yet decidedly more vital realm of Chinese library card catalogs, phone books, dictionaries, telegraph code books, stenograph machines, font cases, typewriters, and more—the infrastructural subbasement of Chinese script whose systems of inscription, retrieval, duplication, cat- egorization, encoding, and transmission make it possible for the above- ground “Chinese canon” to function. We find ourselves in the plumbing and the electrical grid of Chinese.
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Despite their uncanny resemblance to actual Chinese, the graphs that formed the Book from the Sky resist all attempts to be read, offering the viewer no knowable sound (yin), meaning (yi), or shape (xing).
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This triad—yin-yi-xing—is of very old provenance in China, and many would say constitutes the three fundamental dimensions through which to define and understand Chinese writing in all its structural, stylistic, phonemic, and heuristic qualities.
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In this book, I will refer to these dimensions collectively as the technolinguistic.
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The technolinguistic domain does not stand apart from the better known yin-yi-xing triad; in fact, the historical transforma- tions that take place within it—and especially those that throw it into cri- sis—are arguably more critical than those of sound, meaning, and shape.
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Over the course of the late nineteenth century, and most notably in 1905 with the aboli- tion of the Civil Service Examination system, controls that the state and establishment intellectuals enjoyed over the Chinese language steadily crumbled, eliciting acute anxieties over when and how a new regime of language would take shape, what it would look like when it did, and who would be positioned at the apex of this new hierarchy.
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Continuity is strange because, despite commonsense understandings, it is in no way synonymous with conservatism. To continue something—in this case, to continue character- based Chinese script—can be avant-garde, iconoclastic, radical, and even destructive. Phrased differently, while it is virtually a cliché to speak of the “destruction” often entailed in acts of creativity, rarely do we pause to reflect upon the destruction central to acts of continuation.
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Like Tancredi, they too believed that in order for everything to stay the same, everything must change.
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While the Chinese typewriter did find its way into major Chinese corporations, as we will see, as well as metropolitan and provincial gov- ernments across the country, the Chinese typewriter did not transform the modern Chinese corporation or the functioning of Chinese govern- ment. For better or worse, no history of the Chinese typewriter can stake its claim upon the idea of “impact.”
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To bring a nonalphabetic script into a technological domain that was built with alphabets in mind, engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, and everyday users had no choice but to bring both script and technology into a shared criti- cal space, posing questions that today might sound like irresolvable Zen kōans, but which in their original contexts were deeply practical ones: What is Morse code without letters? What is a typewriter without keys? What is a computer where what you type is not what you get?
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The history of modern Chi- nese information technology is not one that derives its importance and relevance from the magnitude of its immediate effect, but from the inten- sity and endurance of its engagement.
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… metaphor of sound: if the Chinese typewriter cannot be heard except through Anderson’s score, the Tommy Gun, and the tip tip tip of Bollywood, is it in fact possible to hear this machine at all? This is the principal methodological challenge of this book.
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There exists no such thing as a “China-centered” history of the Chinese typewriter—nor of Chinese modernity.
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To hear the Chinese typewriter, I argue, it is necessary both to interrogate and deconstruct our own longstand- ing assumptions about technolinguistic modernity—a practice that by now comes naturally to the historian—and to eschew all expectations that the act of critical reflexivity has the power to liberate us from these assumptions. No matter how intently I have listened to the Chinese type- writer over the past decade, and no matter how intently I have sought to denaturalize the cadences of the Remington machine and the QWERTY keyboard that play on perpetual loop in the recesses of my mind, there has never been a point during that time when I could hear the Chinese typewriter all by itself.
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More accurately, the technolinguistic consciousness of the modern age is Remington, and to engage the Chinese typewriter is at all times to do so inside the Reming- ton field.
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Within and of itself, the deconstruction of our assumptions and categories does not rid us of these assumptions or categories. To historicize and deconstruct something is merely to desta- bilize it momentarily, to open up brief and fleeting windows of time in which something—anything—might happen that would be impossible if a given concept were allowed to reside in numb, dumb slumber.
31 1 Incompatible with Modernity
…when we view deni- grating cartoons of monstrous Chinese machines, or seemingly neutral statements about Chinese technolinguistic “inefficiency,” we are in fact staring at the death mask of our own once vibrant technolinguistic imagi- nation—the collapse of a once rich ecology of both machines and ways of thinking about machines that has since disappeared into the monoculture of the Remington world.
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The “Chinese typewriter” as monstrous Other was, in this way, the byproduct of a collapsing technolinguistic imagination in twentieth- century America and Western Europe.
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This history of our collapsing tech- nolinguistic imaginary took place across four phases: an initial period of plurality and fluidity in the West in the late 1800s, in which there existed a diverse assortment of machines through which engineers, inventors, and everyday individuals could imagine the very technology of typewrit- ing, as well as its potential expansion to non-English and non-Latin writ- ing systems; second, a period of collapsing possibility around the turn of the century in which a specific typewriter form—the shift-keyboard typewriter—achieved unparalleled dominance, erasing prior alternatives first from the market and then from the imagination; next, a period of rapid globalization from the 1900s onward in which the technolinguistic monoculture of shift-keyboard typewriting achieved global proportions, becoming the technological benchmark against which was measured the “efficiency” and thus modernity of an ever-increasing number of world scripts; and, finally, the machine’s encounter with the one world script that remained frustratingly outside its otherwise universal embrace: Chi- nese.
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11In 1891, Prince Damrong dispatched Edwin to the United States with a very particular charge: to develop a typewriter for the Siamese script, just one of the court’s many reform and modernization initiatives.
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One option was the index typewriter, a form of typewriter that did not have keys or a keyboard, but instead employed a flat or circular plate upon which the letters of the alphabet were etched.
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14The earliest known index machines were the Hughes Type- writer for the Blind (1850), the Circular Index (c. 1860, maker unknown), and the Hall Typewriter, developed in 1881 by the American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Hall.
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A second option was the single-shift keyboard typewriter, exemplified in the manufactures of the Remington Typewriter Company.
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A third option, and the one that Edwin ultimately chose, was the dou- ble-keyboard machine designed by the Smith Premier Typewriter Com- pany.
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When it came time for Edwin to finalize a manufacturing agreement, it was in Syracuse, and not at the factories of Hall or Remington, that he found the best fit for the needs of Siam’s modernization efforts (figure 1.4). Siam was to be Smith Premier country…
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The year 1915 marked the second, abrupt turn in the history of Siamese typewriting, and one that would in the end push the McFarland clan out of the typewriter business entirely. This change came, not from dynam- ics within Siam, but because of corporate maneuvers taking place half a world away in the United States.
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…the new innovation of “visible typing” pioneered by the Underwood company. Up to this point, leading typewriter models were structured in such a way that the printing surface of the page was not viewable by the typist, being oriented inward toward the machine’s type bars. To examine the text one was typing, a typist needed to lift up the chassis to view the typewritten text. Underwood’s new model boasted a fully visible alternative that met with widespread approval and con- sumer demand.
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…abandoned their original double-keyboard format, moving to the increasingly dominant single-keyboard, shift-key typewriter form. As a consequence, the global supply of double-keyboard machines dried up—a shift that mattered perhaps little in the English-language market, but one that took out of circulation the device that formed the basis of Siamese typewriting to that point.
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With the transition to a single-keyboard design, elements of Siamese writing once considered compatible with the technology of typewrit- ing were suddenly flagged as “problems.” The “characters are so numer- ous,” remarked Abel Joseph Constant Cousin (1890–1974), inventor and French priest who worked with Remington’s competitor, the Underwood corporation, to develop a new model of Siamese machine.
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Remington first presented its new product to the world in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition, although with little fanfare; it was outshone there by Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which cap- tured worldwide attention. It was not until the 1880s and early 1890s that the company measurably increased its reach into markets both at home and overseas.
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Part and parcel of Remington’s ascendancy was the decline and disap- pearance of those alternate typewriter forms that Edwin McFarland had contemplated not long ago. The diverse ecology of approaches that had once characterized early typewriting steadily thinned out, replaced by a technolinguistic monoculture populated exclusively by varieties of the single-shift design. Double-keyboard machines like those from Edwin and George’s past disappeared entirely from the market, while non-key- board index machines all but vanished.
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37As McFarland’s generation gave way to the next, moreover, new cohorts of inventors chose almost with- out exception to use the single-shift machine as their mechanical starting point when contemplating the design of foreign-language machines.
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42What emerges is the effect of an omni- lingual, omnicompetent, reified ur-typewriter that “comes in” Burmese, Korean, Arabic, Georgian, or Cherokee, the same way that its high-gloss exterior might “come in” black, gray, red, or green.
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More than the Remington typewriter, it was the Remington typewriter factory that constituted English. To trans- late the English-language Remington machine into Arabic, Khmer, Rus- sian, or Hebrew was, in actuality, to translate the Remington factory itself.
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Engagements with exotic writing systems were not simple binaries, then, pitting Self against Other, or alphabetic against nonalphabetic. They involved a complex spectrum along which each of the alphabetic and syllabic scripts of the world were ranked on a scale of greater and lesser compatibility with the modern.
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No matter the disagreements, however, typewriter inventors in the twentieth century all subscribed to one powerful orthodoxy: never should the encounter with exotic scripts throw the single-keyboard type- writer form itself into question in any fundamental regard.
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The single-keyboard machine had not only conquered the global typewriter market. It would seem to have conquered script itself.
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The most profound impact was reserved, however, for the one world script that it failed to absorb: Chinese.
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While different in many ways, Ara- bic, Hebrew, and Siamese were, in some fundamental sense, commen- surable with the typewriter—and therefore, commensurable with the technolinguistic modernity it represented.
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For predictable financial reasons, typewriter developers and manu- facturers never entertained the notion of abandoning their pseudo-uni- versal typewriter form in the face of a recalcitrant Chinese script. What ensued was precisely the opposite. They dispensed with all of the roman- tic notions of civilizational possibility that characterized their engage- ments with other languages. They abandoned their seemingly boundless willingness to interrogate and reimagine many of the typewriter form’s most taken-for-granted features. Instead, they marshaled all of the mate- rial and symbolic resources at their disposal to set out on what would become an unrelenting, multifront character assassination of the Chinese script itself—a kind of technolinguistic Chinese exclusion act.
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Phrased differently, the single-keyboard typewriter form would finally realize its universality by excommunicating from this universe one of the world’s oldest and most widely used writing systems.
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…self reliance, induced con- tempt of other nations, hindered their progress.” 58Such languages were understood as being stuck in a state of arrested development that, in turn, froze in time those who spoke and thought in, with, and through these languages.
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Chinese was long a preferred target of social Darwinism. Comparativ- ists dwelled on its “ideographic” script, tones, and lack of conjugation, declension, gender, and plurality. Chinese was, for many, the quintes- sential antipode, a conviction so powerful that even apologies for the Chinese language could be drafted into the service of its critique.
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Perhaps Chinese speakers were able to express themselves as completely as those of Western languages in a cognitive sense, and so Hegel was wrong. Yet technologically, speakers and writers of Chinese were demonstrably hindered by their onerous script, one that obstructed literacy and the adoption of modern information technologies such as telegraphy, typewriting, stenography, punched-card computing, and more—and so Hegel was right.
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The typewriter form that emerged during the twentieth century, and which spilled out into a broader ico- nography, is an object we think with and through, not an object we think about. By accident of history, our consciousness at this particular moment in time is Remington.
74 2 Puzzling Chinese
For four painstaking years, Gamble and his Chinese colleagues—referred to by Gamble as “Mr. Tsiang” and “Mr. Cü”—examined roughly 1,300,000 Chinese characters in total, spread out over four thousand pages. 2Work- ing line-by-line, they made a record of every one of these characters, counting every time each character appeared, and organizing the data into handwritten tables.
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…how can one possibly “contain” this overwhelming Chinese abundance, whether within the confines of human memory, a printer’s rack, a telegraph code, or a typewriter? The language itself seems to be all the evidence one needs as to its puzzling inscrutability.
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As this chap- ter will argue, no matter how natural or inevitable a particular “Chinese puzzle” might seem to us in retrospect, all “Chinese puzzles” are in fact historically constructed and variable.
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We will call these three puzzlings common usage, combinatorialism, and surrogacy.
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…arture, the common usage approach to Chinese technolinguistic modernity was one geared toward reducing the Chinese lexicon to its most essential units, which in turn required the kind of painstaking statistical work undertaken by Gamble and his associates.
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…combina- torialism—was premised upon reimagining Chinese writing as a form of quasi-alphabetic script in which one could decompose Chinese charac- ters into a set of modular shapes that the operator would then use to build, or “spell,” characters piece by piece…
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In this approach, what was called for was not a reduction of the Chinese lexicon, but a criti- cal reimagining of the very essence of Chinese writing itself, transposing the idea of “letters” and “spelling” atop Chinese writing and reimagin- ing the structural components of Chinese characters—often referred to as “radicals”—as the equivalent of letters in the Latin alphabet…
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… premised neither on counting and ranking Chinese characters nor on cutting them up into pieces, but on symbolic systems that could be used to stand in for, or refer to, Chinese characters—particularly in the arena of the emerging technology of telegraphy.
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Decades before linguists, engineers, and language reform- ers would attempt to resolve the “incompatibility” they saw between Chinese and typewriting, then, Gamble sought to resolve a still earlier “incompatibility”: between the Chinese script and movable type.
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