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played at a certain time, may generate sadness, which is meaning. It’s part of the musical grammar that European culture invented, which allows composers to con- vey moods or emotions. It wouldn’t mean the same to someone raised in a different culture. I once heard a well-known opera with a computer scientist from India. He told me that all arias sounded the same to him. For him, meaning came through rhythms and harmonics associated with Indian classical music. In fact, the formal mechanisms that we use in computing to generate and recognize syntactic struc- tures are the same for music and language — both involve the hierarchical organiza- tion of the constitutive elements.

Tell me about your new opera, Fausto. We wanted to explore the impact of information technology on humanity, so we transported Faust to the modern world. The original Faust sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in exchange for eternal youth and knowledge. Our Fausto is a hipster who is addicted to social media and virtual reality. Devas- tated by the suicide of Marguerita, who loved him, he makes a pact with Mephis- topheles: in exchange for virtual com- Early Chinese typewriters had thousands of keys to search through. munion with her, he will upload his mind and leave his body to Mephistopheles. HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY It’s a cautionary tale. Humans are being drawn into virtual worlds, and the ques- tion of how we might upload our minds to enjoy eternal life is being discussed. How China sidestepped I see this as a dangerous trajectory. Our minds are embodied both physically and socially, as Mephistopheles knows. It is QWERTY the reason he wants bodies — so that, by inhabiting them, virtual agents like him Raja Adal investigates the 150-year history of a can feel fully human. Fausto only realizes typewriter able to reproduce thousands of characters. it as his mind is uploading: he’ll never have real love in a virtual world. hen the A key is pressed on a — wrestled with the Will there be a role for new technologies QWERTY keyboard, the letter challenge of typing in the opera? ‘a’ appears on the screen. When Chinese characters. The actors will wear virtual-reality Wthat key is pressed in a standard Chinese The problem was glasses, and the audience will be able word-processing program, however, it sheer number: any- to see what they are seeing, which will triggers a dozen or so Chinese characters thing from 2,000 to be projected onto a screen. This will that are pronounced ‘a’. Thomas Mullaney’s 8,000 Chinese char- heighten the sense of blurred bounda- The Chinese Typewriter tells the story of the acters (called kanji in ries. Is Marguerita real or virtual? Dead techno­linguistic innovations behind the Chi- Japanese and hanja in or alive? Could Mephistopheles be an nese typewriter, and how they led to input The Chinese Korean) are consid- app? We want to create an atmosphere of methods used in Chinese computers today. Typewriter: A ered a basic require- uncertainty similar to the one in which Improving typing speed was a priority. History ment for a viable artificial-intelligence researchers find At stake was not only the recognition of THOMAS S. MULLANEY Chinese typewriter. themselves today, with respect to one Chinese as a modern language but also, for MIT Press: 2017. Early designs, Mul- important question. That is, are humans the millions of Chinese people employed laney shows, accom- just information processors, or are there in producing government and business modated this sea of characters by putting extra elements, such as consciousness, documents, potentially enormous gains them on individual slugs in a rectangular that we might never be able to capture? ■ in productivity. The economic, cultural tray bed. The typist had to hunt and peck and geopolitical stakes were so high that, for the desired character, which a mechani- INTERVIEW BY LAURA SPINNEY. for 150 years, engineers and linguists from cal arm would then project onto the page. This interview has been edited for length within China and beyond — including the That challenge led to fascinating taxonomic and clarity. Soviet Union, Japan and the United States innovations aimed at efficiency. Instead

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The MingKwai machine narrowed the selection to just 72 keys.

(1895–1976) in the mid-1940s, the Ming- the advent of the word processor; jotting Kwai typewriter had even more character characters on a piece of paper was much slugs than the average Chinese typewriters of more efficient. What will the future of input the day — 8,352. Instead of using the hunt- look like? Voice recognition may let us and-peck method on thousands of keys, entirely sidestep the keyboard; with stylus- however, the typist (primarily Lin’s daugh- equipped tablets, handwriting could make a ter, Lin Taiyi) had to contend with only 72. comeback. From this perspective, the history of organizing the characters by counting Two sets, upper and lower, held constituent of the Chinese typewriter is part, not only of their graphical components, or radicals and parts of Chinese characters; another set held the history of the keyboard, but also of the strokes — as is common in Chinese orthogra- eight number keys. The rest of the mecha- much larger history of inscription. phy — new methods arranged them accord- nism, including character slugs, was hidden Within that broader scope, this book ing to factors such as their usage frequency. inside the machine. Pressing a key from the joins recent works such as Lisa Gitelman’s During a period of experimentation first set narrowed the choices by a factor of Paper Knowledge (Duke University Press, starting in the early twentieth century, 36; pressing one from the second narrowed 2014) in exploring the each character still had its own key; but for them down to 8 characters or fewer. These “Anything intersection between Mullaney, the main lesson of this history is appeared in a window and were selected from 2,000 technology and lan- that inventors soon began to pioneer com- using the number keys. to 8,000 guage. The Chinese pletely new methods for text input. It was This “sleep-deprived, torment-ridden characters are typewriter was the they who started to dispel the “myth of history”, during which inventors and entre- considered outcome of a process immediacy” represented by the nineteenth- preneurs “were never permitted to drift a basic that required both a century direct-input keyboard, and who off into the comfortable dream of imme- technological rethink- opened up the possibility of typing Chi- diacy like their counterparts in the alpha- requirement ing of the alphabetic nese in a way that accepts a lack of direct betic world”, had an immense, but delayed, for a viable typewriter and a tax- correlation between what you type and impact. Attempts to improve the Chinese Chinese onomic reordering of what you see. Ultimately, their work led to typewriter, such as the MingKwai, paid off typewriter.” the Chinese language. today’s sophisticated predictive-text engines, only after the 1970s, in the computer age. If we think of recent which benefit from increasing processing Then, the IME transformed the Chinese transformations in how we read, write, WWW.PEARLSBUCK.ORG; ARCH. PEARL S. BUCK HOUSE, RECORD GROUP SIX-LIN YUTANG GROUP SIX-LIN ARCH. PEARL S. BUCK HOUSE, RECORD WWW.PEARLSBUCK.ORG; ABOVE: COURTESY THOMAS S. MULLANEY; RIGHT: COURTESY PEARL S. BUCK INTERNATL, PEARL S. BUCK INTERNATL, COURTESY RIGHT: THOMAS S. MULLANEY; COURTESY ABOVE: power and cloud integration. The Chinese keyboard into a ‘smart’ peripheral, much search and communicate — from e-books to computer IME (input method editor) now more sophisticated at taking instructions smartphone keyboards, searchable databases enables access to characters, entire words from the user than its static, rather stupid and Twitter feeds — and of the ways in which and even commonly used sentences at the alphabetic cousin. Mullaney’s history is thus these changes affect every­thing from our press of a key. a pre­history of computer input, and will political environment to scientific research, Among several early designs that did away be followed by his The Chinese Computer technolinguistic transformation is more with the thousands of key slugs was the 1915 (forthcoming from MIT Press). relevant than ever. The Chinese Typewriter ‘divisible type’ machine devised by Qi Xuan, Some may ask how relevant the keyboard provides a captivating exploration of one a student at New York University. This broke is to the future of input. Japanese engineers, of the most consequential techno­linguistic individual characters into their constituent after all, developed the fax machine to escape feats in modern history. ■ parts, which were then pieced together by the constraints of the the typist. NATURE.COM keyboard. Typing on Raja Adal teaches Japanese history at the The most interesting invention, however, For more on science a Chinese, Japanese University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. He is also the one Mullaney sees as the most in culture see: or Korean typewriter is currently working on a global history of direct ancestor of the Chinese IME. Invented nature.com/ remained difficult, writing instruments. by towering literary figure Lin Yutang booksandarts slow and tiring until e-mail: [email protected]

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