The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press)

Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of popular imagination, sensational accounts of twelve-foot keyboards with 5,000 keys. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. The Chinese Typewriter, not just an "object history" but grappling with broad questions of technological change and global communication, shows how this happened.. Clerks and secretaries in this era experimented with alternative ways of organizing characters on their tray beds, inventing an arrangement method that was the first instance of "predictive text." Today, after more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. This book is about those encounters -- in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Later came type

Mullaney is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. . Thomas S

This is a rich book that encompasses different resources, historical insights, and intriguing storytelling from long and broad perspectives. It explains what is behind Chinese thinking and its unique working method, and why China is what it is today. The Chinese Typewriter is a fascinating and extensive study into the characteristics of the Chinese language. (Ai Weiwei)Mullaney reveals a topic I have always attempted to investigate through my art. This book will help readers understand and appreciate China, the Chinese language, and writing in general with greater and necessary nuance. The book is not about the tool itself, but the characteristics of Chinese-writing cultures. (Xu Bing, artist; creator of Book from the Sky and Square Word Calligraphy)The Chinese Typewriter is lucidly written and brilliantly conce