Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter

The instruction booklet for the Royal #10, the machine Rosalind Russell favored in His Girl Friday, begins by noting that the operations of a typewriter are so well known that no instructions are necessary. By the early years of the twentieth century, the interface between the fingers and the QWERTY keyboard were part of the muscle memory of modernity, and not just in the English-speaking world. The keyboard and carriage design, adaptable to Arabic, Urdu, and Cyrillic alphabets, was the innovation behind a global communications infrastructure driving the operations of businesses and empires. Only one language was left out—the one spoken by more people than any other. For China’s modernizers, as Thomas S. Mullaney shows in The Chinese Typewriter: A History, the absence of a typewriter, and more fundamentally of an alphabet, signified the country’s incorrigible backwardness and posed an existential danger. Connection with the modern world could be accomplished only by sacrificing character-based writing—and with it centuries of literature and learning, which effectively undergirded the whole of Chinese culture. This crisis is the starting point for Mullaney’s story. The end point is the invention of predictive text.

Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History