Global History of the Chinese Typewriter

The Bowers Museum presents a lecture on the Chinese typewriter.

During its prolonged encounter with Euro-American imperialism, China was enmeshed in a new global order not of its own design. The spread of this new order was greatly facilitated by, and helped globalize, information technologies such as the telegraph and typewriter that were structured around alphabets – something that the Chinese language does not possess. What ensued was over a century of critical experimentation with the technological limits and potential of the Chinese language, in which an eclectic and transnational cast of characters asked the question: can Chinese characters be saved on China`s march towards modernity? One concrete question they posed was: how do you build a Chinese typewriter?

In this talk, Professor Tom Mullaney of Stanford University will chart the three main answers proposed to the ``puzzle`` of Chinese typewriting - and, with it, modern Chinese information technology more broadly. Each solution has deep historical roots, and proposed a radically different vision for the future of both the Chinese language and the modern Chinese nation. As we will see, experiments with Chinese typewriting formed part of a much larger culture of innovation that emerged around the ``Chinese problem,`` and culminated in the development of an immense and complex Chinese character-based information infrastructure that would come to govern the quotidian yet indispensable realm of indexes, lists, catalogs, dictionaries, braille, telegraph codes, stenograph codes, typesetting machines,  typewriters, and computers.

Presented in association with the UC Irvine History Department.