A quote that is attributed to Tom Robbins says: “At the typewriter you discover who you are.” Or in the case of a unique machine that has been missing for decades, the same can be said for finding one.
In January, Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson sorted items in the basement of Jennifer’s grandfather in New York. They came across a typewriter as they had never seen before, with Chinese keys. Nelson posted a few photos in a Facebook group called What’s My Typewriter? “From my search on the internet it seems to be a Mingkwai made by Chinese,” he wrote. “I just can’t find any ever that is being sold here in the United States. Is it even worth something? It weighs a ton!”
Increasing enthusiasm ripped because of the comments, because it turned out that the machine was indeed a Mingkwai – called “clear and fast” – the only one of its kind in the world.
The discovery has been missing for more than half a century and led to a multitude of messages from people around the world who wanted to buy the machine or to place them in museums. It is now in the collection of Stanford -Bibliotheken.
Invented in 1947 by writer, translator and linguist Lin YutangThe typewriter was the first compact concept that contains a keyboard that could produce the 80,000-plus characters of the Chinese language. He has achieved this by creating a kind of sort-and-search method.
“Lin broke out Chinese ideographers in more fundamental components of strokes and shapes and arranged the characters in a linear order, as an English dictionary does with alphabetical words,” describes researcher Yangyang Chen in Made in China Journal.
The keyboard consists of 72 options, which can be combined to make someone’s desired signs. Chen continues:
By printing on one of the 36 top character component keys and one of the 28 lower component keys at the same time, the machine would find a maximum of eight corresponding characters. The user could see the candidates through a special view star on the device, which Lin called his ‘magic eye’, and select the correct selection by pushing the respective numeric key.
The company Carl E. Krum built the only well -known prototype of the Mingkwai, says Stanford report. Lin was unable to have a sufficient commercial interest to produce the expensive machine, so he sold the prototype and the rights to Mergenthal Linotypebedrijf, where the grandfather of Jennifer Felix worked as a driver. The typewriter has never been introduced and it has eventually disappeared – so far.
Stanford is planning to use the unique machine for research, exhibitions and academic programs. Regan Murphy-Kao, director of the East Asia Library, says: “I could not be happier to make this extraordinary prototype accessible, retain and make it for a grant.”
