Tom Mullaney didn’t think he would ever see the legendary MingKwai. The professor of Chinese technological history at Stanford University in California, who has been collecting Asian typewriters for years and even wrote a book about itassumed that the only prototype built had been lost.
But he was legendary, says Mullaney. “When I explain it to my students, I always ask them to imagine a keyboard with just one key, with which you can write English in record time. That is actually the MingKwai. It has about seventy keys, but can write ninety thousand Chinese characters.”
Chinese has tens of thousands of characters. Although about three thousand are sufficient in everyday life, that large number makes it difficult to develop typewriters that make typing as easy as in languages that use the Latin script.
Computers and smartphones nowadays solve that problem with a software keyboard: you type the searched word in pinyin — a system developed in the 1950s for the transcription of Chinese into Latin script — and you can then choose the right characters from a list. Míng kuài thus becomes 明快
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The MingKwai typewriter did something similar: when you press two keys, each representing part of a character, you see the projection of eight possible corresponding characters on a glass plate, which can then be selected with a number key.
The colossus housed six sets of six cylinders each, which were brought into the correct position based on the keystrokes used. Each had eight sides with 29 characters, so a total of 8,352 characters could be written. By adding individual ‘radicals’ – fixed building blocks of Chinese characters – a total of more than ninety thousand combinations are possible.
Distant ancestor of the MacBook
Apart from that technical marvel, the MingKwai has a deeper, historical meaning, according to Mullaney. “Until the nineteenth century, you couldn’t really say that Chinese writing was a problem. The first printed book was Chinese, movable type printing was invented there. You could buy a book in China and Japan for the price of a bowl of noodle soup, when in Europe you still had to take out a mortgage for it.”
But the invention of telegraphy changed everything, Mullaney explains: “Warfare, trade, etc. But the downside is that you have to convert Chinese writing into the very limited system that is Morse code. You got a new device, the keyboard, which is the link between man and machine, and which has limited physical space.”
Western disk machine manufacturers such as Remington, Olivetti and IBM all tried to enter the Chinese market, but were unable to do so with the Western keyboard as a base. So they built alternative devices, big clunky things, creating a kind of parallel technological universe.
The MingKwai brought Chinese writing back into the technological mainstream. Although the device never went into production, it is the conceptual precursor to all modern input methods for non-Western languages, Mullaney says. “When someone types Chinese on a Macbook Pro, they are using it in ways that Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs never anticipated. It essentially makes the MingKwai a distant ancestor of the billion-dollar Chinese IT giants we have today.”
Chinese Civil War
The MingKwai was invented by Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a Chinese writer, linguist and inventor who had moved to America. He also gives the device its name, which means something like ‘bright and fast’, and has a prototype built with the money he has been able to save through his successful writing career. But Lin is not an engineer: to bring his invention to market, he needs a manufacturer who could build the typewriter on a large scale.
Time is not on Lin’s side. He presents his MingKwai in 1947, while nationalists and communists are fighting a civil war in China. “In 1948 the communists gain the upper hand, and it’s over in early 1949. And companies don’t like that kind of thing,” says Mullaney. Lin is kept on a string and eventually goes bankrupt. All his savings are in the project.
The Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang with his typewriter, the MingKwai, which could form ninety thousand Chinese characters, circa 1941.
Photo Getty Images
The only prototype ever built remains in the possession of Mergenthaler Linotype, a manufacturer of typesetting and printing machines, and when it moves, the MingKwai disappears from view. When Lin’s daughter inquires about the machine at the company, she is told that it has been thrown away. All that was left was the patent application.
“I was convinced the MingKwai had ended up in a landfill somewhere,” says Mullaney, who became fascinated with Chinese typewriters when he came across Chinese characters whose pronunciation or meaning no one knows anymore because they have fallen into disuse. “I started wondering: which characters are in loose type, which are on a Chinese typewriter? And then I realized that I had never seen a Chinese typewriter before.”
Exploded phone
But Jennifer Felix of Massapequa, a small town on Long Island about an hour and a half drive from New York, had unknowingly owned the unique typewriter for years. “My father died in Arizona in 2020. We then brought a lot of stuff to New York and stored it in storage,” she says via video connection. “We were paying $80 a month for that all this time, so I thought it was time to check it out.”
Her husband emptied the storage and brought all the boxes to their house. “When I got home I asked: what’s in that box?” says Felix. A typewriter, her husband replied, that one the content had not looked at extensively. “But when I opened it, it turned out to be a Chinese typewriter.”
Felix isn’t sure how the MingKwai came into her family’s possession, but Tom Mullaney later learned that her grandfather had worked at Mergenthaler Linotype. Apparently he took the machine with him when the company wanted to get rid of it. “Maybe my grandfather thought it could make money, or maybe — and I hope so — he contributed to it himself. He was an engineer, there were all kinds of large equipment in his basement. He built working steam engines himself.”
Felix’s husband posted a few photos of the machine on Facebookin a group of typewriter hobbyists. Soon his phone exploded due to the many responses. Many people mentioned the name of Tom Mullaney, who not much later came forward in a private message to tell them how special their find was.
The MingKwai has been moved to Stanford University, California, where the device is being further researched.
Photo Elisabeth von Boch/Stanford University
“My phone suddenly started vibrating. I started getting messages from all my social media,” said Mullaney, who had set up a Google Alert for the search term “Chinese typewriter.” “I read the texts, I saw the photos, and within a millisecond I knew: this is it. It was very confusing, as if a deceased relative suddenly appears at your door.”
My biggest fear was that the MingKwai would end up in the summer house of an oil tycoon, who would serve martinis on it
“My biggest fear was that the finders would put the MingKwai on eBay, or have it auctioned off at Sotheby’s. That it would end up in the summer house of an oil tycoon somewhere, who would serve martinis on it.” Mullaney came into contact with the Felix couple. “I said, of course it’s your decision, but give me the opportunity to tell you what I know about the MingKwai. And I gave them a list of six places that could take good care of the machine.” Stanford was also on it — the institute to which Mullaney is affiliated has a large collection of East Asian IT equipment.
Working replica
The couple decided on the MingKwai to sell to Stanfordwhich was able to raise the money for this thanks to a private donation. That was not a difficult decision, says Felix. “We could have had it auctioned off, but we didn’t want it to end up in someone’s home and possibly get lost again.”
The MingKwai turned out to be in excellent condition after decades in a closed box. Be there now scans of the machine were made “with an industrial scanner, which SpaceX uses to study rockets,” says Mullaney. This should make the precise operation clear. “We want to build an exact replica, because we know the principles, but we don’t actually know exactly how the mechanism works. And there is only one of them, we can’t take it apart and try it out.”
“Only when a working copy of the MingKwai has been built can we perhaps use it to bring the original back to life. But until then: maybe you press a key and it gets stuck and then it’s game over.” Mullaney can’t wait. “You have no idea how much I would love to turn it on.”
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