by Veronique Greenwood
[At the end of last month, I posted a pair of articles on the new words and phrases being added to out speech, however temporarily, by Generation Alpha, drawn from their socializing on the Internet. Now here’s a slightly different language report, based more in the past than today’s use of language, and more about writing, or more precisely typing, than speaking.
[Veronique Greenwood’s piece about one man’s quest for an almost-80-year-old typewriter just intrigued me. As it happens, I engaged in a long—though not years-long—search for something that became an obsession not unlike Thomas Mullaney’s. In my case, it was a published letter from Tennessee Williams, and I told the tale in “A Tennessee WilliamsTreasure Hunt” (11 April 2009).
[Typewriters have been the topic of a post on Rick On Theater before. Check out “Pearl Tytell, Matriarch of Document Sleuths (1917-2021)” (17 October 2021). Greenwood’s article was published in the “Metropolitan” Section of the New York Times of 27 July 2025. It was also posted on the paper’s website as “A Professor’s Hunt for the Rarest Chinese Typewriter” on 22 July 2025, updated 24 July 2025.]
A professor’s search for a machine that could produce thousands of characters.
In 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself way out in the suburbs of London. A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was going to be renovating her house soon, she told him, and it needed a new home.
Dr. Mullaney [b. 1978], a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years searching the globe for Chinese typewriters, wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of Chinese characters while remaining small enough to keep on a desk.
The typewriter, 50 pounds of metal frame and levers, was one of a dying breed. If he didn’t save it, would it wind up on a scrapheap?
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices that he’d hunted down.
But there was one typewriter that Dr. Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese.
Only one — the prototype — was ever made.
“It was the one machine,” he said recently, “which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.”
Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.
Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.
Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.
It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?
Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.
Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.
That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.
He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”
Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.
Then there was the fellow in Northern California who had held on to two Japanese typewriters, as rare as the Chinese varieties, for some decades. “He looked at me and said, ‘Is your trunk big enough?’” Dr. Mullaney recalled. It was, just.
Dr. Mullaney took home those typewriters, and the typewriter in London and others like them, because it had begun to dawn on him that he might soon be one of the only people alive who knew what these machines were, who really understood their stories. He might be the last thing standing between these machines and oblivion.
The MingKwai [sometimes written as Ming Kwai or Mingkwai] is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters.
It was invented by Lin Yutang [1895-1976; see bio below], a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically — perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers.
Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine.
Dr. Lin’s solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened.
Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Dr. Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.
Dr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Dr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.
He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”
Dr. Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer.
It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment.
Dr. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn.
And that, as far as Dr. Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine’s last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared.
In his 2017 book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” Dr. Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.
This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Ms. Felix’s father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. “What’s this?” Ms. Felix asked her husband.
He’d had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it’s that typewriter.
She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Mr. Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” and posted some photos.
Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Mr. Felix checked on his post.
There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom.
The couple looked at each other. “Who’s Tom?”
Dr. Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off — ping, ping, ping.
The small community of people he’d encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention.
As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai.
But he didn’t rejoice. He didn’t sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear.
What if they didn’t know what they had and sold it before he could get to it?
Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that.
He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone.
He told them the MingKwai’s story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon.
Ms. Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement.
But Dr. Mullaney had made an impression. “It was lost for half a century,” she said. “We didn’t want it to get lost again.”
“To me it’s just a typewriter,” she continued. “But to other people it’s history; it’s a story, a life, a treasure.”
Dr. Mullaney figured out that Ms. Felix’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It’s likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home.
Then it was passed down to Ms. Felix’s father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him.
“That’s what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,” Ms. Felix said.
Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn’t know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds.
In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor.
This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Dr. Mullaney lay down to look at it.
The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he’d seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it — perhaps revealing what was going on in Dr. Lin’s mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one.
Lying on his stomach, Dr. Mullaney began to wonder.
[Veronique Greenwood is a freelance science writer and editor. She’s written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Pacific Standard, Time, Discover, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and many others. She writes a column about food and science for BBC Future, a website and section of the British Broadcasting Corporation that delves into a wide range of subjects, including health, technology, climate change, social trends, and psychology.
[Wikipedia has a page on the “Chinese typewriter” which includes a section on the MingKwai. Thomas Mullaney has several books and articles on the subject of Chinese typewriters and related devices:, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (M IT Press, 2017); "90,000 Characters on 1 Keyboard," Foreign Policy (July 2018); "Meet the mystery woman who mastered IBM's 5,400-character Chinese typewriter," Fast Company (17 May 2021); The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024).
[At the end of the article on the Chinese typewriter, Wikipedia reports:
The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley". The last Chinese typewriters were completed around 1991.]
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A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LIN YUTANG
[This bio-sketch is from the website Academic, drawn from the Wikipedia entry for Lin Yutang.]
Lin Yutang (October 10, 1895 – March 26, 1976) was a Chinese writer and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.
Lin was born in the town of Banzi in Zhangzhou Fujian province in southeastern China. This mountainous region made a deep impression on his consciousness, and thereafter he would constantly consider himself a child of the mountains (in one of his books he commented that his idea of hell was a city apartment). His father was a Christian minister. His journey of faith from Christianity to Taoism and Buddhism, and back to Christianity in his later life was recorded in his book “From Pagan to Christian” (1959).
Lin studied for his bachelor’s degree at Saint John’s University in Shanghai, then received a half-scholarship to continue study for a doctoral degree at Harvard University. He later wrote that in the Widener Library he first found himself and first came alive, but he never saw a Harvard-Yale game. He left Harvard early however, moving to France and eventually to Germany, where he completed his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Peking University. On his return to the United States in 1931, he was briefly detained for inspection at Ellis Island.
Dr. Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate Gwoyeu Romatzyh a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters.
He was interested in mechanics. Since Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language, with many thousands of separate characters, it has always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, worked on this problem for decades and eventually came up with a workable typewriter -- brought to market in the middle of the war with Japan.
He also invented and patented several lesser inventions such as a toothbrush with toothpaste dispensing.
After 1928 he lived mainly in the United States, where his translations of Chinese texts remained popular for many years. At the behest of Pearl Buck, he wrote “My Country and My People” (吾國与吾民，吾国与吾民) (1935) and “The Importance of Living” (生活的藝術，生活的艺术) (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, which became bestsellers. Others include “Between Tears and Laughter” (啼笑皆非) (1943), “The Importance of Understanding” (1960, a book of translated Chinese literary passages and short pieces), “The Chinese Theory of Art” (1967), and the novels “Moment in Peking” (京華煙雲，京华烟云) (1939) and “The Vermillion Gate” (朱門，朱门) (1953), Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (當代漢英辭典，当代汉英词典) (1973).
His many works represent an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1970s.
His wife, Lin Tsui-feng was a cookbook author whose authentic recipes did a great deal to popularize the art of Chinese cookery in America. Dr. Lin wrote an introduction to one of her and their daughter Lin Hsiang Ju’s (林相如) collections of Chinese recipes. His second daughter, Lin Tai-Yi (林太乙) was the general editor of Chinese Readers’ Digest from 1965 until her retirement in 1988.
Dr. Lin [died in British Hong Kong at the age of 80, and] was buried at his home in Yangmingshan, Taipei, Taiwan. His home has been turned into a museum, which is operated by Taipei-based Soochow University. The town of Lin’s birth, Banzi, has also preserved the original Lin home and turned it into a museum.
[The Chinese inserts embedded in this post are in the original. I assume they’re translations of the titles of Lin’s books and transcriptions of the Chinese names that have been romanized here. I neither read nor speak Chinese, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the translations/transcriptions, but rather than strip them all out, I have chosen to leave them for any reader who does read Chinese.]
