The keys to Chinese

The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But what if some things appear to remain irreducible, complex and laborious? The Chinese writing system is one such case. For early information technologists, it presented what appeared like insoluble problems. Unlike an alphabet of 26 (English) or even 84 (Siamese) letters, the huge number of Chinese ideographic characters could not easily be reduced to a typeable common corpus. (Three 20th-century compilations totalled between nearly 50,000 and over 80,000 separate characters). So while the standardised Remington-style type-writer conquered the rest of the world, China remained awkwardly to the side, leading some to lament the seeming backwardness of the Chinese character system. But others refused to be deterred, with the inventor Zhou Houkun declaring:

Blame the engineer, but do not blame the language… An engineer who cannot build machines according to reasonable specifications is not an engineer in the best sense of the word.

But statistical analyses of key Chinese texts, from Confucius to the Chinese Bible, demonstrated that perhaps a few thousand characters formed a body of common usage — radically simplifying the issue. Numerous attempts at reimagining the typewriter to handle this range were made. Zhou Houkun used a metal finding rod which would hover over a bed of 3,000 common characters (replaceable via tweezers, if less frequently used characters were required), corresponding to characters on a connected metal cylinder. When the rod was pressed down on a character on the tray, the other end brought the corresponding character on the cylinder to the printing position.

This model was bought by Commercial Press in Shanghai and became the first popular commercial machine, and indeed the subject of China’s first animated film in the 1920s.