"The Quest for a Lost Chinese Typewriter"

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 (see “New Word Coinages” [29 July 2025]).  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 (MIT 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.]

*  *  *  *
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 [1937-45].

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 [1892-1973; humanitarian and Nobel Prize-winning writer], 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 [1936-95] 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[; b. 1930]) collections of Chinese recipes. His second daughter, Lin Tai-Yi (林太乙[; 1926-2003]) 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 text.  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.]

Pearl Tytell, Matriarch of Document Sleuths (1917-2021)

 

On 4 October 2021, the New York Times published the obituary of Pearl Tytell.  She had died at her home in Riverdale, The Bronx, on 26 September at the age of 104.  Mrs. Tytell had a remarkable history, as you shall read. 

Pearl Lily Kessler was born on 29 August 1917 in the Borough of Manhattan, New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn.  Her father was Harry Kessler, a tailor who immigrated from Austria-Hungary, and her mother was Yetta Kessler (née Feigenbaum), who emigrated from Poland when she was 2. 

Pearl Kessler went right to work after school and in 1938, she was working in the bookkeeping office of a company in the now-iconic Flatiron Building, at the convergence of 5th Avenue and Broadway just south of Madison Square.

That’s when she met her future husband, Martin Kenneth Tytell (1913-2008), a typewriter sales- and repairman who came looking for a service contract with the company for which Pearl worked.  He sold her a typewriter—"I asked for a Royal, and he sold me a Remington,” recalled Mrs. Tytell years later.

Martin Tytell asked Pearl Kessler to dinner, but no date was made for that night so Martin came back the next day and offered, “Come work for me and I’ll marry you.” 

“That’s no inducement,” Pearl teased.

Nevertheless, Pearl did go to work for Martin . . . but the marriage didn’t take place until 1943.  In 1938, Martin Tytell started the Tytell Typewriter Company on Fulton Street in the Financial District of downtown Manhattan, where a wall sign declared “psychoanalysis for your typewriter, whether it’s frustrated, inhibited, schizoid or what have you.” 

Before long, the shop became such an important part of the New York office scene, repairing and customizing all brands and models of typewriters and serving the needs, often idiosyncratic, of the city’s typists, that even the post office knew to deliver mail to the shop addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York.”

Mr. Tytell described some of the stranger requests he fulfilled:

For a well-known mystery writer, I once designed a keyboard with a variety of crosses and bones, and an astronomer once left my office with a typewriter containing a fantastic array of space symbols, such as ringed planets, comets and stars.  A few years ago, I had a man ask me to build him a typewriter with question marks—nothing but question marks. . . .  I completed the job according to his specifications, but I never did learn what it was all about.

(Could it have been . . . The Riddler?)

The Tytells’ reputation spread beyond New York City and the shop catered to such celebrity typists as writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi’s Honor); journalists Quentin Reynolds (war correspondent), Margaret Bourke-White (photojournalist), David Brinkley (The Huntley-Brinkley Report, NBC), Harrison Salisbury (New York Times), Andy Rooney (“A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” 60 Minutes, CBS), and Charles Kuralt (CBS); Washington, D.C., socialite and political hostess Perle Mesta (“The Hostess with the Mostess”); and political adversaries Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President of the United States: 1953-61) and Adlai E. Stevenson (Democratic candidate for president, 1952 and 1956). 

But that was just the beginning of the Tytells’ adventure in the world of the written—and typewritten—word.

When World War II began for the United States, typewriters needed by the military became scarce because manufacturers had largely converted to the production of other war materiel.  Martin Tytell, who in 1943 had joined the army, was asked to convert a load of contraband Siamese (now called Thai) typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to French (preparatory to the D-Day invasion) and other European languages.

(Some sources report that Mr. Tytell enlisted in the Marines, but he himself affirmed that he was in the army during World War II.  See his own account, referenced below, of his work on the Alger Hiss appeal.)

Mr. Tytell’s machines were each able to function in several different languages (because the Thai typewriters had 46 typebars; standard American typewriters have 44).  In all, there were 17 languages, including, in addition to French, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Danish, and German.  They were airdropped to OSS outposts at various combat fronts, but PFC Tytell never learned where. 

Ultimately, Martin Tytell developed typewriters in dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects such as Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Korean, Coptic, Sanskrit, and classical and modern Greek.

Mr. Tytell even invented a typewriter with a carriage that moved left to right for languages that are read right to left like Farsi (the language of Iran), Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish.  He’s credited with the creation of the first cursive font—for First Lady Mamie Eisenhower—and the first Teleprompter. 

He also designed machines that typed musical notes for musicians and composers and with keyboards adapted for amputees (in two models: one for right- and one for left-handed users) and other wounded veterans and machines for people with impaired sight.

After Martin Tytell was released from the army in 1945, he returned to his shop, where Pearl Tytell had been minding the business (mostly as a rental shop while her husband was away).  His work and the special assignments for the military and the OSS, which increased in frequency after the success of the Siamese typewriter conversions, had made him an expert in type faces and their idiosyncrasies and faults.

Then in 1950, the Tytells were introduced to a whole new aspect of the world of typewriters.  It changed both their lives and their son’s as well.

Into Martin Tytell’s shop walked a young man who identified himself as a member of the defense team for Alger Hiss (1904-96).  Hiss was an official of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations who in 1948 had been accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Less than two months earlier, Hiss had been convicted on two counts of perjury, but was appealing the conviction on the grounds that he’d been the victim of “forgery by typewriter.”

Hiss’s attorney wanted Tytell to prove that his client’s contention was possible by building a typewriter that would mimic the characteristics of Hiss’s Woodstock model so exactly that experts would be fooled.  It took Mr. Tytell two years to assemble the necessary parts and build the machine, but he succeeded.  Nonetheless, Hiss’s appeal was denied and he served three years and eight months imprisonment on a sentence of two five-year terms.

(Mr. Tytell recounted this entire episode in exacting detail to Harry Kursh, a freelance journalist, in “The $7,500 Typewriter I Built For Alger Hiss” for True magazine in August 1952.  It’s posted on The Alger Hiss Story website at http://algerhiss.com/history/the-hiss-case-the-1940s/the-typewriter/forgery-by-typewriter/forging-a-typewriter/ as “Building a Typewriter.”)

Along the way, Martin Tytell became even more expert in typewriter mechanics and type identification and Pearl Tytell became a self-taught authority on typewriter ribbon, paper, and handwriting.  In 1951, Pearl opened the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory within Tytell Typewriter.

After Martin and Pearl Tytell hung out their second shingle, they were consulted by police departments, the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of State, as well as city, state, and federal courts.  Other clients were large corporations such as CBS, General Electric, Eastern Airlines, Reynolds Aluminum, and Shell Oil, looking into the provenance of counterfeit documents, forged checks, altered forms, or anonymous letters to the CEO.

They were hired by many prestigious law firms to testify in trials and hearings all over the globe as expert witnesses.  (That’s usually Pearl Tytell’s assignment; Pamela Tytell [b. 1949], Pearl and Martin’s daughter, said that her “father wasn’t good on the stand.”)  Their son, Peter Van Tytell (1945-2020), even testified before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

In a field dominated by men, Pearl Tytell was a rarity.  In The Atlantic, Ian Frazier, a writer and humorist who now writes for the New Yorker, described her as

handsome and petite, with unwavering blue eyes and long silver-blonde hair, which she wears in a braid wrapped carefully on the top of her head.  For clothes she favors suits in subdued colors or pleated skirts in dark plaid, and neat white blouses with a cameo brooch at the throat.  She looks like someone you would believe on the witness stand.

Just to be even-handed, here’s Martin’s self-description: “I have always been on the tall, round and broad-shouldered side.”  Ian Frazier took over:

He was wearing a clean white lab coat over a light-blue shirt and a dark-blue bow tie.  His head was almost bald on top and fringed with white professor-style side hairs that matched the white of his small moustache.  His blue eyes were slitted and wary and humorous, and all his features had a sharpness produced by a lifetime of focusing concentration down to pica size.

Pica is a type size that measures 10 characters to an inch.  Its alternative is elite type, which takes 12 characters to make an inch.  Typewriters come in one gauge or the other (though when the IBM Selectric was introduced, they could be switched to type in either size so type elements for both pica and elite could be used in the same machine).

Pamela Tytell declared, “Clients often hired my father, but she did all the work.”  Pearl Tytell trained her son, Peter, who became a highly regarded document examiner in his own right. 

Even after she retired in 2001, Pearl Tytell consulted with her son on his cases.  According to his sister, Peter would bring his mother his work: “Every other Sunday,” said Pamela, “he’d show her the cases, and she’d give her opinion.”  After Mrs. Tytell’s comments, he’d say, “Boy, some of the things she said, I didn’t think of.”

In testimony to her effectiveness, the prosecutor in one case said, “She was an exceptional witness.  She dominated the courtroom.  I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.”  In a case in which a company had forged documents over which someone had sued, the plaintiff’s lawyer acknowledged that the Tytells’ evidence “was testimony the jury thought very convincing.”

Indeed, many of the cases in which the Tytells presented evidence and expert testimony, the matter never went before a court.  A report from the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory would be enough to bring the guilty party to the settlement table.  The New York Times reported, for example, in a 1975 suit that was settled in 1980:

When the Tytells found Western Electric had altered documents in order to disprove charges of job discrimination against women and minorities, for example, the company settled out of court, and picked up the lab’s $7,500 tab.  “None of their evidence was actually ever admitted into the courtroom,” a spokesman for Western Electric noted.  “We conceeded [sic] that we had altered the documents.”

Mrs. Tytell attended New York University in the 1960s and earned a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master of Arts degree, both in accounting.  (At least one source states that it was Pearl Kessler—that is, Mrs. Tytell before she was married—who went to NYU.  This could make sense if her degrees were in accounting since her job in 1938 had been in the accounting department of the company.)

In any case, however, this was not the end of Pearl Tytell’s education.  She took courses in paper-making and graphology (the study of handwriting); she even lectured at NYU and was a faculty member at the New York Institute of Criminology.  The Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory eventually branched out into documents generated by computers and word processors, fax machines, photocopiers, and laser printers.

As always, though, the division of labor, remained the same: Martin Tytell was the expert on typewriters and typewritten documents and Pearl Tytell was the authority on paper, ink, watermarks, and, above all, handwriting.

“I find myself talking to the typewriters sometimes,” proclaimed Mr. Typewriter.  “You get so you feel you’re dealing with something that’s alive.”  And his wife once said, “Handwriting talks to me.  So do typewriters, ink and paper.”  One gets the feeling they were the yin and yang of document authentication.

One of Pearl Tytell’s most frequent quests was the unmasking of the anonymous-letter writer, the poison penman.  “We get one case a week of poison-pen letters,” she reported.  “They can destroy a career, a reputation, a marriage or a whole life.”

One such incident involved a string of unsigned letters received by the patients of a doctor and the parochial school at which he volunteered.  In the days before abortion was legal, the letters accused the doctor of performing illegal terminations.

The Tytells had determined from experience that among anonymous letter-writers, many are often middle-aged men and women.  Because of one recurring phrase in the letters calling the doctor’s wife “a dirty housewife,” Mrs. Tytell surmised that this letter-writer was a woman related to him.  It turned out to be the doctor’s sister.

Typecast as a typewriter repairman, Mr. Tytell played his part and visited the sister’s office.  He obtained a sample of her typing and proved her involvement.

The Tytells continued to be on call for high-profile or newsworthy cases, however.  In 1963, a little more than ten years after the Hiss appeal, Pearl Tytell disproved the claim by Eugenia Smith (1899-1997) of Chicago that she was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna (1901-18), the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra.

Mrs. Tytell was working for Life magazine this time, and she compared Smith’s Russian handwriting to examples known to have been written by Anastasia Romanova.  The document examiner found clear differences between the way Smith wrote the Cyrillic letter е and the way the Grand Duchess had written it.  Mrs. Tytell also found other discrepancies, such as confusing the Russian word привить (privit' – ‘inoculate’) for привѣтъ (privet – ‘greetings’).

[The handwriting in question, reproduced in a Life article, “The Case of a New Anastasia” (18 October 1963, pp. 110, 111), is Old Russian, in use until 1918.  The letter ѣ (yat – in the phrase “I embrace you’: цѣлую тебя – tseluyu tebya), which has a sound like a e (yeh) in the modern Russian alphabet, no longer exists in Russian; the sign ъ (at the end of ‘greetings’)—it’s not a letter but indicates how the previous letter is pronounced—is the “hard sign” (твёрдый знак – tvyordii znak) and is used only rarely in modern Russian (though it’s still part of the alphabet).]

Mrs. Tytell reported to Life: “In gross appearance alone, the two sets of documents are markedly different.  When examined letter by letter, the differences are even sharper.”

(Another, more famous Anastasia imposter was Anna Anderson [1896-1984], on whose story the 1956 Twentieth Century Fox film starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner was based.  Anderson was ultimately unmasked, however, by DNA tests once all the Romanov bodies were found and identified in 2007.)

Pearl Tytell was also instrumental in the 1982 federal trial of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012), leader of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), for tax evasion.  She once again used handwriting analysis, in addition to her knowledge of watermarks and paper-making, to provide expert testimony.

Moon was convicted of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and filing false tax returns and served nearly a year in prison. 

(Interestingly, I read Pearl Tytell’s obituary because I wondered if she’d been involved in any of the recent famous instances like the phony Hitler diaries or the George W. Bush letter that scuttled Dan Rather’s career at CBS and the survival of 60 Minutes II.  She hadn’t, but her son, Peter, had. 

(The 2004 60 Minutes case involved typed memoranda from the files of President Bush’s former Texas Air National Guard commander that purported to show that Bush [43rd President of the United States: 2001 to 2009] had received special treatment while serving in the early 1970s.  His National Guard service was the reason Bush, unlike his Democratic opponent for the presidency that election year, Senator John Kerry, didn’t serve in Vietnam.

(After the 60 Minutes segment aired on 8 September 2004, the memoranda’s authenticity was questioned and CBS hired Peter Tytell to examine them.  He determined that the documents couldn’t have been typed on the Olympia manual machines used by the Texas Air National Guard at the time and, furthermore, that they’d been written on a computer word processor, technology not even generally available in the early ’70s.

(A 60 Minutes producer and three network executives were fired over the incident—not for complicity in the hoax, but because they’d been careless about vetting the evidence for a segment that made the sitting President of the United States look bad when it aired.  They were so anxious to get the segment on the air before Election Day, 2 November, that they let forged documents, false evidence, be presented as factual.

(60 Minutes II, a Wednesday night edition of the long-lived Sunday television magazine program, which had been launched in January 1999, was cancelled a year after the Bush segment was broadcast.  Dan Rather [b. 1931], who, in addition to his correspondent’s position at the newsmagazine, was the anchor of the CBS Evening News, left the anchor’s chair in 2005 and the network fired him the following year.)

Typewriters were already things of the past by the 1980s.  Proclaimed Peter Tytell, “The new generation doesn’t know what a typewriter is.”  Martin Tytell, Mr. Typewriter, retired in 2000; Pearl followed in 2001.  Son Peter closed the shop in 2001 and converted the space into an office for the document examination service his parents had started half a century before.

The Tytell Typewriter Company, opened in 1938, was no more.  And now, with the death of Peter Tytell last year, so is the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory.  It’s not just the end of an era . . . it’s the end of a world—the world of platens and typebars and carriages and inked ribbons and white out and eraser shields and carbon paper.

In the end, what makes Pearl Tytell interesting to me, above the fact that she was one of the few women in the heavily male-dominated field of document authentication and even attained prominence in it, is that, although Mrs. Tytell learned about typewriters from working with her husband in his shop, she deliberately set out to learn about paper-making and handwriting and watermarks and other aspects of document-creation and authenticity in order to make herself an expert in verification.  She essentially invented herself. 

[When I was in the army and training at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, we had to take a typing course.  (This was years before the advent of word processors.)  Military Intelligence Special Agents, after all, had to type our reports, the results of all our investigations and activities. 

[Our typing teacher was a pretty ancient lady—I’m sorry to say I don’t remember her name after 50 years.  She’d been “Miss Typewriter” of 1921 (no joke!).  She often instructed us, in all seriousness, that “the typewriter is the agent’s weapon”!

[I didn’t really believe her.  I carried a snub-nosed .38 on the job.  It fit in the holster better.]