She memorised IBM typewriter codes for 5400 Chinese characters but couldn’t save tech giant’s ill-fated machine – AsiaOne
I had seen this woman before. Many times now. I was certain of it.
But who was she? In a film from 1947, she is operating an electric Chinese typewriter, the first of its kind, manufactured by IBM. Semi-circled by journalists, and a nervous-looking middle-aged Chinese man – Kao Chung-chin, the engineer who invented the machine – she radiates a smile as she pulls a sheet of paper from the device. Kao is biting his lip, his eyes darting between the crowd and the typist.
As soon as I saw that film, I began to riffle through my files. I am a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, in the United States, and I was years into a book project on the history of modern Chinese information technology, and the Chinese typewriter specifically.
By that point, I had amassed a large and still-growing body of source materials, including archival documents, photographs, and even antique machines. My office was becoming something of a private museum.
As I thought, I had indeed encountered the typist in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language?
The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine – not something just anyone could handle with the skill of the young typist in the film. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal grey chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 to 5; 0 to 9; 0 to 9; and 0 to 9. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanise than English or other Western writing systems.
To type a character, one depressed four keys – one from each bank – more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. Just as the film explained, “If you want to type word number 4862 you would press four-eight-six-two and the machine would type the right character.”
Each four-digit code corresponded with a character etched on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Spinning at a speed of one revolution per second, the drum measured 18cm in diameter and 28cm in length. Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters, letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals and a handful of other symbols.
How was the typist in the film able to pull off such a remarkable feat of memory? Certainly, there are a host of professionals who, in the course of their daily work, are able to wield an impressive array of codes – telegraph operators, emergency responders, court stenographers, musicians, police officers, grocery store clerks. But none of them have to memorise thousands of ciphers or codes. This young woman was a virtuoso.
Excited to share the film with others, I posted a brief write-up about it on a blog I used to run, and that was that. One day, however, a comment appeared (a rare occurrence). “Thank You for the memories,” it read. “I am the woman demonstrating the Chinese typewriter in the recent restored movie. If you’d like more info please contact me.”
My heart skipped a beat. Could this really be her? Or was it a scam concocted by a netizen with too much time on their hands? I had to respond, but I proceeded with caution. In the postscript, I included a shibboleth of sorts: a question which, I knew from my research, could be answered only by the original typist, someone who knew her, or someone who, like me, had spent years in Chinese archives and rare book collections.
Lois Lew responded – accurately.
My doubts evaporated, replaced with excitement. I responded immediately, eager to arrange a time to speak. I had so many questions. How did she become involved in the IBM project? What was her background? What was it like to use the machine? How did she memorise all of those codes?
But my email to Lew went without a response. I sent a polite follow-up email. Silence again. Finally, the trail went entirely cold. I never learned why.
It would be another eight years before I reconnected with Lew, this time thanks to a friend and former employee of hers. Like Lew, he saw a blog entry of mine and reached out. Perhaps because I was vouchsafed, thanks to my exchanges with her friend, this time the conversation took place. And it was well worth the wait.
