However, the technology proved highly useful to Western alpha-numeric printers. It is well known that movable type was Song dynasty technology that generally proved too cumbersome to replace woodblock printing due to the complexities of Chinese ideographs. The last invention, if it is indeed his, seems to me to have been a sad concession to the economic challenges of manufacturing and marketing a complex Chinese electronic typewriter and other complex electro-mechanical devices. Kao was also the named inventor on other patents, including a meteorological recording machine and apparatus USPN 2,408780A (1944) a copy holder for stenography USPN 2617386A (1949), a Japanese language telegraph printer USPN 2,728,816A (1953), and an automatic egg roll machine USPN 3,633,517A (1967). A diagram from one of his patents is pictured above.
A somewhat earlier patent describes a keyboard-controlled ideographic printer having permutation type selection USPN 2,427,214 (1943). One of Kao’s patents discloses a Chinese language typewriter wherein a keyboard of approximately 36 keys controls the coordinate selection and printing of any one of 6000 different Chinese characters or ideographs, USPN 2,412,777 (1944). It may have been an early form of the kind of ethnically diverse technology “clustering” that has characterized New York’s technology developments in the last decade. Coincidentally, the stenographers and telegraph operators of my family also hailed from Forest Hills. He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1955. The Chinese typewriter that Lew used was a slightly earlier invention of Kao Chung-chin of New York in the 1940’s.īased on public data, Kao appears to have been born in 1906, and was a resident of Forest Hills, NY. Lin Yutang, the well-known scholar, popular author and first President of my Chinese language alma mater (Nanyang University 南洋大学 in Singapore), also invented a Chinese typewriter. Wikipedia notes that there have been dozens of variations of Chinese typewriters beginning with other inventors in the early 1900’s. Most recently he published a remarkable article on Lois Lew, the improbable Chinese woman who mastered that early, 5400 character IBM Chinese typewriter and demonstrated it to the world in the 1940’s. It was not uncommon for people who understood very little of Chinese to inquire “well, how do they type?” Typing was essential, China was a mystery, and implicitly the inability to easily type was holding back China’s development.Ī Stanford University professor, Thomas Mullaney, wrote a book on the development of the Chinese typewriter and its implications for communications, in 2017. In addition, there were numerous competing technologies and designs for typing, typewriters and electronic transmission of documents, among them the Morse code, the telegraph and early facsimile machines Most Americans at that time also had little understanding of China or the Chinese language. Typing on paper was one method of fixation “in a tangible form” of content that would satisfy United States copyright law requirements. Typing and transcription was an important labor-intensive part of the US economy.ĭevelopment of typing technology had important IP-related implications. Other family members worked in telegraphy. My mother was also both a stenographer and skilled typist, and we would sometimes compete with each other at home for speed and accuracy. I learned to type in 8 th grade, from the moms of my classmates who volunteered to work with us. The leading manufacturer of sturdy and responsive business typewriters was IBM. In the era before computers and the Internet, an electric typewriter was the leading technology for preparation of formal documents.
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