The full proper and true bibliographic citation
Mullaney TS (2017) The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Main field/subfields
History of science, technology, computing,
Interlocutors
Cites influences to technolinguistic approach Bernard Siegert, Delphine Gardey, Markus Krajewski, Ben Kafka, Miyako Inoue, Mara Mills, Matthew Hull and in China Francesca Bray et al's Graphics & Text and Christopher Reed, Michael Hill, Elizabeth Kaske, Robert Culp and Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova in modern period.
Notes difference to object history (e.g. article Commodity Histories Bruce Robbins) where agency of object is assumed; technolinguistic is a broader context which allows for analysis of all of the ‘plumbing’ associated to a given object. Easy to see typewriter as an object without an impact if we follow the thing, rather than the technolinguistic context.
Notes difference to diffusionist histories that look at technology transfer and adoption such as Headrick The tentacles of history and Rogers Diffusion of Innovation. Tendency to assume China leapfrogged the typewriter and jumped to e.g. mobile phone if we see technologies as static entities being diffused from one pole to another. Prefers an agonist approach in a broader technolinguistic domain. Typewriters as linguistically embedded and mediated technologies.
Notes difference to China-centered histories such as that of Paul Cohen (Discovering History in China). Argues there is no such thing as a Chinese history of the Chinese typewriter or Chinese modernity. His approach is agonistic. Argues that the act of deconstruction does not endure. Destabilisation is only momentary. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Notes criticism of idea of technological abyss between alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages proposed in Havelock Origins of Western literacy, who saw the Chinese script as a historical irrelevance and the Greek alphabet as revolutionary (evolutionism with Hegelian antecedents?). Hegel wrote that the Chinese script was a hindrance to the sciences in the philosophy of history. This criticism of Chiense writing grounded in ideas of race/cognition/evolution reappears in 20C but is grounded instead in technology. Eric A. Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1976), 28, 44.
Periodization
19C and 20C
Major people/places
China, Japan, European missionary centres, Silicon Valley Various “engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, language reformers, and everyday practitioners” (p. 10)
Main methods, sources and archives
Methods:
A technolinguistic as opposed to sociocultural or cognitivist approach to history. This focuses on the “engineers, linguists, entrepreneurs, language reformers, and everyday practitioners” (p. 10) that saw Chinese characters as innocent, in contrast to the reformers and revolutionaries that variously wanted to abolish or reform the Chinese language itself. Technolinguistic keeps the face and the metal together; i.e. it maintains the connection between content and form. Maintaining this connection avoids the notion of language crises that renders simplification of characters, vernacularisation of written language and mass literacy as the key to contemporary linguistic modernity. In a technolinguistic approach these steps towards modernity valorised in CCP historiography are framed as complicating factors in progress towards technolinguistic modernity. Baihua increased volume of characters; mass literacy meant greater diversity of user; simplification entailed changing the fonts.
An agonistic methodological posture: “a posture in which our ultimate goal is not to arrive at a singular, harmonic, conflict-free, and final description of the history in question, but one that makes ample space for, and even embraces, dis- sonances, contradictions, and even impossibilities that are understood to be productive, positive, and ultimately more faithful to the way human history actually takes shape” (p. 30)
Sources:
He uses Chinese, Japanese, English, French and Italian written sources. He spoke to descendants of inventors, e.g. of Devello Sheffield, inventor of first Chinese typewriter, Shu Zhendong, co-inventor of first mass-manufactured Chinese typewriter, Yu Binqi, inventor/manufacturer of the Yu-Style Chinese Typewriter, Hisakazu Watanabe various Japanese typewriters.
Archives:
Mullaney built a physical archive that consists of e.g. library card catalogues, phone books, dictionaries, telegraph code books, stenograph machines, mimeographs, font cases, type writers and computers from the start of the 20C to today, from collections in “China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Italy, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere”. This is now housed at Stanford and is called the Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection. It has 2,500 items, mostly from China but also around East Asia (Japanese imperialism), and elsewhere (European missionaries; Silicon Valley). It was the basis for an exhibition: https://www.radicalmachines.org.
Main aim(s)
Narrate technolinguistic history of Chinese typewriter and through this to “examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity” (p. 23)
Main argument(s)
The Chinese typewriter was essentially the original word processor. As opposed to QWERTY which needed to be an inscription device, it needed to be a tool for search and retrieval. The recognition of this subverts the standard narrative of language modernization in China, which focuses on calls to abolish Chinese characters in favour of alphabetic languages like Esperanto, and various efforts to simplify Chinese language in order to ameliorate the challenge of the ‘technolinguistic hegemony’ of alphabetic languages and their use in the communication and information environment. A focus not on ‘to be or not to be’ but ‘to be but how’ retrieves an untold history that is core to the contemporary information environment.
“To continue something—in this case, to continue character- based Chinese script—can be avant-garde, iconoclastic, radical, and even destructive” (p. 22). Continuity and discontinuity are not antithetical. The question is what to continue and what will be discontinued as a result. Everything needed to change in order to preserve the yin-yi-xing triad of sound, meaning and shape in the Chinese language that was challenged by technolinguistic hegemony. The changes that achieved this are more radical than e.g. the proposals to abolish characters when viewed with this in mind, and much more successful.
Structure / Key points or interventions or sub-arguments:
“The first chapter describes the mechanical solutions to designing typewriting machines for English and other alphabetic and syllabic languages, including Arabic and Thai… The second chapter examines the many efforts to solve the rep- resentation of Chinese characters… The third chapter examines the early versions of Chinese typewriters developed by missionaries in China in the nineteenth century or designed by Chinese engineers during the early twentieth century. Most designs were based on selecting in- dividual characters from a base ofmore than 2,000 common-usage words arranged on a cylinder or flat tray, which were then used to print the character on paper with a mechanical mechanism. This led to the growth ofan indigenous typewriter indus- try and a new profession of Chinese typists that Mullaney discusses in the fourth chapter. The design was also adapted to the Japanese typewriters developed in the early twentieth century for kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing, and Mullaney describes in the fifth chapter how these typewriters became an instrument of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and were gradually adopted by the Chinese market. In the sixth chapter, Mullaney investigates the fascinating story of the MingKwai Chinese typewriter, a new design developed by Lin Yutang, the celebrated author of My Country and My People… The seventh chapter explores the history of Chinese typewriters and typists during the first decades of the People’s Republic of China.”
Useful reviews or responses (include link / DOI if possible) and key points from these
Cullather N (2019) The Chinese Typewriter: A History. American Historical Review 78(4): 1049–1050. DOI: 10.1093/ml/78.4.637.
“A race between Japanese manufacturers and their U.S. competitor Remington Typewriter Company would determine which information order China would be absorbed into. Relative to the United States, Japan held the military and commercial advantages. In the late 1940s, when the Chinese Communist Party seized factories and began manufacturing Double Pigeon type- writers as part of a “mass knowledge” campaign (299), the new machines were of Japanese design” (p. 1050)
“Whereas the QWERTY typewriter was an instrument for inscription, the Chinese device, from the beginning, needed to be a machine for search and retrieval—the original word processor” (p. 1050)
Baark E (2017) The Chinese Typewriter: A History. (80): 174–176.
Chapter overview above.
Jacobowitz S (2020) Thomas Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History. East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 51–52: 178–180.
“From the outset, in an introduction aptly titled “There is No Alphabet Here,” Mullaney is determined to de-center universal alphabetization as a precondition for global order, both in terms of linguistic sequence and geopolitical hierarchies. It is a welcome corrective to a premise that one finds ubiquitous, for instance, in Friedrich Kittler’s understanding of Western discourse networks”