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KPBS Midday Edition

San Diego Chinese Historical Museum Premieres Chinese Typewriter Exhibit

A propaganda poster of a Chinese typist painted by Zhou Daowu [周道悟], in 1956 in the People's Republic of China, is pictured in this photo.
A propaganda poster of a Chinese typist painted by Zhou Daowu [周道悟], in 1956 in the People's Republic of China, is pictured in this photo.

San Diego Chinese Historical Museum Premieres Chinese Typewriter Exhibit
GUESTS:Dr. Tom Mullaney, curator, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, executive director of the SD Chinese Historical Museum

This is KPBS Midday Edition. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Were years, it was a metaphor for something impossibly complex of frustrating. The Chinese typewriter. The reason the machines are so daunting, the Chinese language has no alphabet and there are more than 70,000 Chinese characters used in writing by hand the typewriters that encompassed the language are larger than Western typewriters and you are of them exist. A new exhibit at the San Diego Chinese historical Museum will feature the Chinese typewriter and its history. Joining me is Dr. Thomas, curator of the exhibition. Radical machines and Chinese in the information age. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. 70 is the executive director of this Museum. Welcome. It is a pleasure to be here. What do these machines look like? Is there any resemblance to a Western typewriter? First feature that strikes most people when they see a Chinese typewriter for the first time, the basic fact that there is no keyboard. The typewriters worry -- were used to, the keyboard is one of the main features but on a Chinese typewriter, instead of a keyboard that you press the buttons with your keys or with your fingers, there is a trade bed. It is a grid, roughly 2500 of the most commonly used Chinese characters in the language. To type, you move the trade bed around to find the characters that you want to bring into the typing position. That is how you physically type on? That is right back Tiffany, before this went on display, had you seen this? Back I had not. This is something that we say, a paradox for many. I have talked to many of our constituents. Most people have never seen a Chinese typewriter before. It is something that he think only professionals would be using. What struck about a? When we and covered and opened the great and got to see some of Tom's precious typewriters, it was absolutely exciting and breathtaking. Also, it is interesting because you are seeing something that at the time it was considered very ordinary like we use computers today. Today, we look at it with it modernize and we see these artifacts and legacies of the past which tell a compelling story. You see it beyond the physical machines that they are. Thom, since the language has no mathematical structure and thousands of characters, typewriter operators had to come up with shortcuts to be able to use the typewriter, isn't that right? That his right. When the first Chinese typewriter started to roll off the floors in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the way that those characters that I mentioned, the way that they would have been organized on the trade bed with be basically be according to standard dictionary order. It is not enough to bet that you can imagine for yourself. The word apple comes near the word aardvark so a person knows where it is. The prom is, as people discovered over time, especially in the 1950s and 60s, words like Apple and aardvark do not tend to show up together in actual language. You do not use those together. You might say Apple I or apple butter. So in the 1950s, during the early period, a number of typists basically undertook a predictive text exploration. They abandoned completely this dictionary order and he started to design the layout's of these characters as they saw fit. They tried to crowd together as many characters that tended to go together in action -- actual speech. You might say these three characters, in the 20s or 30s, they might be all over the trade bed in different corners. The 50s, the idea was why don't we put them side by side in his master? If you follow that logic far enough, it gets brilliantly complex because that is 2500 times that is 2500×2449 options. It also gets faster the casual or not traveling long distances over the trade bed. Later in the early years of Chinese computing, these early engineers were aware of the experiments by type is. And he started to incorporate those ideas into Chinese computing. They anticipated what we call predictive text by four decades. Many do not realize that that was first applied non-West but in China and not in the realm of computing at the realm of mechanical typewriter. That is fascinating. When it comes up on my smartphone, we can trace that back to the Chinese typewriter? Well, they were the first widespread application of that idea. That's not to say that Google stole a page from the child there's Chinese typewriting, there were separate discoveries or separate arrivals at that idea. Many people mistakenly assume that was born with Google or born with alphabetic information technology. It was not. Tiffany, considering the mission of the museum, what are you -- what are you hoping visitors take away? Back town touched upon the idea of how in the modern age, are coulters are intermingling. Our languages are doing that also. We increase our footprint in San Diego, our objective is to put forward great stories and to engage people in new and exciting ways and to show that Chinese culture and history really has broad appeal and significance in ways that we would not necessarily expected to be. Take the predictive technology that we have been talking about. It underlies the smart friends. I think the take away from all of this is how multicultural modern society is and how Chinese -- I want to refer year does refer to Tom. You can see an hour exhibition how this is not just the story of China. Is also the quest for typewriter. It is a multi-country initiative. We have Japanese typewriters featured. We have images of Korean typewriters. Big companies like IBM were involved in the process also. This modern world where everything is interconnected, that is an exacting -- exciting part of the exhibition. The exhibit, it will run at the San Diego Chinese historical Museum through mid April. I been speaking with the curator and Tiffany, the Executive Director -- director of the Museum. Thank you both. Thank you. Be sure to watch K PBS evening edition. Join us again tomorrow for KPBS Midday Edition at noon. I am Maureen Cavanaugh . Thank you for listening.

A Double Pigeon-brand Chinese typewriter is pictured in this undated photo.
Tom Mullaney
A Double Pigeon-brand Chinese typewriter is pictured in this undated photo.

A new exhibit, "Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age," at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum explores the history of the Chinese Typewriter.

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The machines, which were first made beginning around 1920, are a technological marvel: the Chinese language has more than 70,000 characters and no alphabet. Designers of the Chinese typewriter manually reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of written text counting how many times characters were used and chose only the most used characters for inclusion in the typewriter grid.

Stanford University historian Tom Mullaney, who curated the exhibit, said an imaginary version of the Chinese typewriter has been an American pop-culture trope since the beginning of the 20th century.

"That was all used to do two things," Mullaney said. "To make fun of the Chinese language by saying look how incompatible Chinese is with this new modern technology of the typewriter and also to by contrast celebrate how wonderful and efficient and modern alphabets are."

The most recent iteration of that is from "The Simpsons," Mullaney said. In one episode, Homer Simpson got a job writing fortunes for fortunes cookies and he dictates fortunes to his daughter, Lisa, who slowly types the fortunes on an imaginary version of a Chinese typewriter.

Mullaney and Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, executive director of the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, discuss the history of the Chinese typewriter Monday on Midday Edition.

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"Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age" runs through April 16, 2017 at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, Dr. Sun-Yat Sen Memorial Extension Building, 328 J St., San Diego, CA 92101.