Chinese typewriter

A Chinese typewriter is a typewriter that can type Chinese script. Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century. However, as the Chinese language uses a logographic writing system, fitting thousands of Chinese characters on the machine needed much more complex engineering than typewriters using a simple latin alphabet, or other non-logographic scripts. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 Chinese characters. Chinese typewriters, and similar Japanese typewriters invented by Kyota Sugimoto, which use kanji adopted from the Chinese writing system, started to appear only in the early 20th century. There have been at least five dozen different versions of Chinese typewriters, ranging from sizable mechanical models to sophisticated electric word processors.

Hou-Kun Chow (Chinese: 周厚坤), a mechanical engineer in Shanghai, is credited with inventing the first Chinese typewriter in 1916. His typewriter utilized 4,000 characters. He had studied in the United States like several other Chinese who also contributed to the development of Chinese typewriters. Hou-Kun first thought about the practicality of a Chinese typewriter in Boston, while he was inspecting American typewriters as a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His efforts were initially hindered by a lack of technical assistance in Shanghai.

Hou-Kun considered it impossible to build a Chinese typewriter with separate keys for each Chinese character. The solution was a mechanical typewriter using a revolving cylinder to fit Chinese characters on the machine. They were ordered by radicals and number of strokes on the cylinder, in a manner similar to Chinese dictionaries. This design however proved heavy, the machine initially weighing at 40 pounds (18 kg) and an improved version at about 30 pounds (14 kg).

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