Incompatible with Modernity: The Chinese Typewriter in the Western Imagination

At the turn of the century, Christopher Latham Sholes’ invention began to circulate the globe, transported and adapted for non-English languages by companies such as Remington, Underwood, and Smith Premier. Upon encountering Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Burmese, Korean, Mongolian, Cyrillic, and other scripts, engineers and entrepreneurs conceptualized each of them in relation to the QWERTY machine and focused their efforts on making slight modifications that would account for salient differences. For these engineers, Hebrew script represented a “carriage advance problem,” being a script that proceeds right-to-left rather than left-to-right. By comparison, the salient engineering challenge for Arabic typewriting involved alphabetic variation, with the shape of individual Arabic letters varying depending upon their location within a word. Arabic was thus conceptualized as “Shift problem,” with engineers finding their solution in the already existent “Shift” key. As the QWERTY typewriter was stretched topologically to encompass more and more of the world’s scripts, there was one that remained frustratingly resistant: Chinese. Because of the specific features of the language, the typewriter-form could not comfortably translate the Chinese script into a set of simple mechanical adjustments. To encompass Chinese, it would seem, the development of an altogether different form would be required, one that did not begin with QWERTY as its logico-mechanical point of departure. This inability to encompass Chinese was not, however, interpreted as a limitation or weakness of the QWERTY typewriter-form, but rather as incontrovertible proof of the Chinese language’s fundamental incompatibility with the technolinguistic requirements of modernity. This paper will examine the history of the QWERTY machine’s circulation and transmogrification, its encounter with Chinese, and the place of the Chinese typewriter within the Western imagination.