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?

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.

Coverage of Lew and Kao’s demonstrations in China was extensive, and overwhelmingly positive. Stories appeared in Science , Signs of the Times , Municipal Affairs Weekly , Science Pictorial , Science Monthly and many other outlets. Publishers were clearly enamoured of Lew. Her face soon appeared in IBM promotional brochures, and the 1947 film, among other media.

“I know how to dress,” Lew told me on the phone. “Very sexy looking. I was beautiful.”

For all the excitement over Kao’s invention, as the 1940s drew to a close it became increasingly clear to him that his venture had failed. No matter the success of the Chinese tour, and the American tour before it – and, above all, Lew’s stellar performance throughout – Kao simply could not convince the wider world that his coding system was practical.

American media cover­age of Kao’s typewriter did not help his cause. In a July 15, 1946 article in Time magazine, the opening paragraph said it all: “The Chinese have a practical reason for believing that one picture is worth a thousand words: it takes so long for them to write the words.”

In the end, however, it was geopolitics that would kill Kao’s project. “The Communist takeover in China was well under way at the time,” a 1964 retrospective article explained, “and was completed before the type­writer had a chance to achieve significant sales in an understandably nervous Chinese market.”

Not only did Mao Zedong’s victory in China push IBM’s anxieties to breaking point, it also threw Kao’s national identity into turmoil. He became a man without a country, being issued a special diplomatic “red” visa by the US. The IBM Chinese typewriter never made it to market, leaving the challenge of electrifying, and eventually computerising, the Chinese language to later inventors in the second half of the 20th century.