“Even though it cost 120,000 US dollars, even though it has saddled us with a lifetime of debt, this creation of my father that he had worked his entire life on, this newborn baby birthed with such difficulty, it was worth it.”
— Lin Taiyi (林太乙), daughter of Lin Yutang (林語堂), on the Mingkwai (明快), the first Chinese typewriter (1947) that had a keyboard and worked almost like its Western counterparts.
Mingkwai, the Miraculous Chinese Typewriter that never lifted off.
n.b.: The Mingkwai's "failure” was not because it didn't work — although it did momentarily at a crucial investors' meeting, that was a small hiccup — but rather, it was a victim of bad luck (wars and politics — more politics than the wars) and timing.
(Done reading "The Chinese Typewriter: A History” by Thomas S. Mullaney and the chapters on the Mingkwai in particular moved me greatly; the ingenuity was on another level!
And the "input” methods for typing in Chinese, quite taken for granted today? Well, Lin Yutang and his Mingkwai can be said to have pioneered them! To quote the book:
"MingKwai marked the birth of ‘input.’ Central to the meaning of ‘input’, we recall, is a technolinguistic condition in which the operator is not using the machine to type characters per se, but rather to find them. As distinct from the act of ‘typing’, the act of ‘inputting’ is one in which an operator uses a keyboard or alternate input system to provide instructions or criteria to a protocol-governed, intermediary system, one that presents Chinese character candidates to the operators that fulfill said criteria. The specific characteristics of these criteria, be they phonetic or structural, are irrelevant to the core definition of input, as is the shape or design of the keyboard or device used in its operation.”
Not saying someone else wouldn't have come up with an input method eventually even if Lin hadn't but as it happened, Lin had/did, and we owe much of how we “type” (input!) Chinese with much ease today to him.)
↑ A replica electronic version of the Mingkwai put together by a group of tech enthusiasts, decades after the Mingkwai prototype was thought lost for good.
P.S.: All black and white photos taken from Mullaney's book.
