For decades, the very idea of a Chinese typewriter was disparaged as an oxymoron in the West, a punchline in popular culture ‘almost synonymous with the paradoxical or impossible’ (Bonavia 1973). Before MingKwai, earlier models of Chinese typewriters had been invented; some were in commercial use. Instead of typing with a keyboard, the characters were set on a tray bed or rotating drum, and the user had to locate them individually for print. The process was slow and labour-intensive. The limited space on the devices meant only a few thousand characters could be included (Mullaney 2017). Learning of Lin’s progress on a new Chinese typewriter in 1945, reporters at the Chicago Daily Tribune consulted their laundryman and a busboy at the local chop-suey joint and speculated on the size of the machine: might it rival the Hoover Dam or at least match the pipe organ in the Chicago Theatre?
The press did not need to guess for long. Two years later, in the summer of 1947, Lin unveiled his creation, the culmination of a three-decade-long endeavour. His second daughter, Lin Tai-yi, a prodigious writer and novelist, demonstrated its use. At nine inches (23 centimetres) tall and less than 20 inches (50 centimetres) in length and width, MingKwai was no larger than a standard English typewriter. Most notably, it resembled its Western counterparts and featured a keyboard. With 72 keys, the device could type more than 90,000 Chinese characters.
The incredible feat was accomplished through a novel sort and search method. Lin broke down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes, and arranged the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words (Tsu 2011, 2014). By pressing one of the 36 top character component keys and one of the 28 bottom component keys simultaneously, the machine would find up to eight corresponding characters. The user could see the candidates through a special viewing window on the device, which Lin called his ‘magic eye’, and select the correct one by pushing the respective numerical key.
In other words, the combination of three keys—two character components and one number—produced a unique address, with which the gears in MingKwai could locate and retrieve the matching character from its memory bank: a cluster of tightly packed metal cylinders where all the character shapes had been set. MingKwai was not just the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard; it also embodied the first Chinese input method and helped lay the intellectual foundation for modern human–computer interactions (Mullaney 2017, 2024).