One year ago, American couple Jennifer and Nelson Felix discovered a peculiar typewriter in boxes cleared out from Jennifer’s late father’s Arizona basement. The characters on its keys appeared to be Chinese. Wondering whether it might be valuable and unable to find any sales listings online, they posted about it on Facebook.
They couldn’t find any sales records because, as they later discovered, the item they had found was the only one of its kind ever produced: It was the long-lost prototype of the MingKwai typewriter, an invention that fundamentally redefined the logic of typing Chinese characters.
In the year since its discovery, the MingKwai has been an object not just of curiosity, but of intense study by academics and other researchers, including myself and my collaborators. Where we once had only old patents and other documents, we now have images of a real, physical typewriter. Its ingenious design, based on a statistical study of the Chinese language, influenced today’s digital input methods for Chinese and also shows an alternative reality of what our computers might have looked like today had their developers not used the Latin alphabet.
The MingKwai’s inventor was Lin Yutang, a celebrated Chinese novelist and scholar living in the U.S. who, after earning substantial royalties from his 1930s bestsellers “Moment in Peking” and “The Importance of Living,” poured his entire fortune into an obsession.
In the first half of the 20th century, the global explosion of information was accelerated by new technologies such as the typewriter and the telegraph. But Chinese, with a writing system consisting of tens of thousands of characters, proved difficult to fit into a technological framework first invented for the Latin alphabet’s mere 26 characters.
Chinese typewriters did exist, but they were clunky machines, requiring typists to hunt through large trays of thousands of individual metal types or to punch in memorized four-digit telegraph codes. For years, Lin withdrew into his study, sorting Chinese characters and sketching drafts, in an attempt to build a Chinese typewriter that could accommodate tens of thousands of Chinese characters while remaining intuitive enough for general use.
In 1947, at a media event organized in his home, Lin unveiled the machine he named MingKwai, meaning “Clear and Quick” in Chinese. Encased in a sleek black metal shell, MingKwai was unlike any existing typewriter. It was slightly larger and heavier, but most importantly featured a unique 72-key interface and a small viewing window right above it that offered a clever solution for Chinese “typing.”