2935: Chinese Typewriters Jan 3, 2024

You may remember the difficulty with devising a method for Arabic typewriters, though it was eventually solved through various simplifications of the script. This option was not possible with Chinese, even Simplified Chinese writing, which only simplified the characters internally, but not the overall difficulty of the sheer volume of characters. All of these problems were also present for Japanese typewriters using kanji, which were the first developed for East Asia. The benefit for the Japanese is that it can be written in the katana script, which is a syllabary.

It would not work to have a keyboard of the radicals: the strokes that make up each character, for two reasons. First, there are simply too many to practically fit on a keyboard—214 in total—but the radicals can fit anywhere inside the character. This was not as problematic for Korean (Hangul), which builds its syllables both longitudinally and latitudinally because there are far fewer places where each letter goes: usually just top-left, top-right and/or bottom. 

Instead, Chinese typewriters worked more like printing presses. The top 2,500 most-used characters were placed around a cylinder, and the cylinder was rotated and slid until a dial was over the chosen character, at which point the mechanism was triggered for that one in particular. Other models used a flat tray, but the process was more or less the same. In many instances, especially with the flat tray, there would be multiple trays in use that needed to be swapped out, again, making this more similar to individually finding keys for a printing press. 

There was no systemization about where the characters were—Chinese characters have no comparable system to alphabetization—so in addition to memorizing all the characters in the first place, operators of these machines would essentially have to memorize where on the cylinder each one was. Given how complicated these were, and that China was not the economic power it is now, typewriters were never a common sight, even in offices, as they were in the West.