? When war erupted, Lew’s family was forced to flee south, largely on foot, on a perilous trek from north China to Hong Kong. Shortly after she was born, her family returned to China, in the years leading up to the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. ? Born Lois Eng on December 21, 1924, in Troy, New York, her early life was marked by struggle, political turmoil, and near constant movement. When the IBM Chinese typewriter was debuted to the world, Lois Lew was a worker in Department 76 of Plant 3 of the IBM office in Rochester, New York. How did she become involved in the IBM project? What was her background? What was it like to use the machine? How did she manage to memorize all of those four-digit codes? I couldn’t wait for the moment when I could speak to her in person. I responded immediately, eager to arrange a time to speak. May I ask what your Chinese name is, in Chinese characters?Īll of my doubt evaporated, replaced with excitement. Lew herself, someone who knew her personally, or someone who, like me, had spent years in Chinese archives and rare book collections: In the postscript, I included a shibboleth of sorts: a question which, I knew from my research, could only be answered by Ms. Thank you very much for making contact, and I eagerly await your response, I was extremely excited to receive your note, and just wanted to confirm: you are the person who worked with Kao Chung-Chin (Chung-chin Kao) to demonstrate the IBM Chinese Typewriter? My name is Tom Mullaney, and I am writing in response to your recent post on my Chinese typewriter blog. But none of them have to memorize thousands of ciphers or codes. 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 special codes-telegraph operators, emergency responders, court stenographers, trained musicians, police officers, grocery store clerks. Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters, ? letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals, and a handful of other symbols.Ī publicity photo of Kao Chung-Chin’s invention.
Spinning continuously at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, or once per second, the drum measured 7 inches in diameter, and 11 inches in length.
#The who mastered ibm chinese typewriter code
?”Įach four-digit code corresponded with a character etched on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Just as the film explained, “if you want to type word number 4862 you would press 4-8-6-2 and the machine would type the right character. To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys-one from each bank-more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5 0 through 9 0 through 9 and 0 through 9. The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine-not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language?
My office was becoming something of a private museum.Īs I thought, I’d encountered the typist previously in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines.
By that point, I had amassed a large and still-growing body of source materials, including archival documents, historic photographs, and even antique machines. I’m a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, and I was years into a book project on the history of modern Chinese information technology-and the Chinese typewriter specifically. As soon as I saw that film, I began to riffle through my files.
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