A quote widely attributed to Tom Robbins says, “At the typewriter you find out who you are.” Or in the case of one unique machine that’s been missing for decades, the same could be said for finding one, too.
In January, Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson were sorting through items in Jennifer’s grandfather’s basement in New York. They stumbled upon a typewriter like they’d never seen, with Chinese keys. Nelson posted a few photos in a Facebook group called What’s My Typewriter Worth? “From my internet search it looks to be a Chinese-made MingKwai,” he wrote. “I just can’t find any ever sold here in the States. Is it even worth anything? It weighs a ton!”
Resounding enthusiasm rippled through the comments, as it turned out the machine was indeed a MingKwai — named for being “clear and fast” — the only one of its kind in the world.
Missing for more than half a century, the discovery prompted a multitude of messages from people around the world wanting to purchase the machine or place it into museums. It is now in the collection of Stanford Libraries.
Invented in 1947 by writer, translator, and linguist Lin Yutang, the typewriter was the first compact concept to feature a keyboard that could produce the Chinese language’s 80,000-plus characters. He accomplished this by creating a kind of 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,” researcher Yangyang Chen describes in Made in China Journal.
The keyboard consists of 72 options, which can be combined to create one’s desired characters. Chen continues:
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.
The Carl E. Krum Company built the only known prototype of the MingKwai, says Stanford Report. Lin was unable to drum up enough commercial interest to produce the expensive machine, so he sold the prototype and rights to Mergenthaler Linotype Company, where Jennifer Felix’s grandfather was employed as a machinist. The typewriter never entered production, and it eventually disappeared—until now.
Stanford plans to use the unique machine for research, exhibits, and academic programs. Regan Murphy-Kao, director of the East Asia Library, says, “I couldn’t be happier to have the opportunity to steward, preserve, and make this extraordinary prototype accessible for scholarship.”
