Chinese typewriter who prepared about 7000 'version' carved letters

Until word processing software and printers using word processors (word processors) and PCs became popular, the main way to create documents was "handwriting" or "typewriter". When typing a key, a typewriter with characters engraved mechanically moves with Gashan and a typewriter transcribing characters on paper needs to prepare all the characters that may be used, Chinese typewriters using so many kanji as well as Japanese seems to have been extraordinary with about 7000 print types.

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The real birth date of typewriter is not certain, and many people have contributed to its evolution. According to a historian, "Typewriters have been reshaped approximately 52 times and are gradually becoming usable," it is also a typewriter besides being commonly witnessed by William Austin-Bart patented in 1829 Typographer Is the world's first type typewriter.

It is also thought that there is a linguistic background of "few letters to be used" when typewriters were born in the West. If it is English, it is 26 letters from "A" to "Z", 52 letters even if uppercase and lowercase letters are included, even if it includes numbers and exclamation marks, it can cover almost all characters with 100 or fewer letters This is an advantage of the alphabet which is "phonogram".

Meanwhile, languages ​​such as Japanese and Chinese using "ideogram" in which each character has a meaning has a feature that the number of characters used increases dramatically. In the case of Japanese, there are 2136 kinds of commonly used kanji which are said to be used in the general society. Furthermore, in China where the Chinese character culture was born, 5000 to 6000 letters are selected only for kanji required for kanji information processing.

For that reason, typewriters supporting Japanese and Chinese need to prepare a large number of typographical characters. The Japanese typewriter "Japan Type Writer Co., Ltd." Japanese typewriter "Small Federal Writer Type Writer SH - 280" is said to be "small," but it also has a very large number of types as shown below. The operator needs to locate the desired character from among the typed characters, and when the lever is pushed down, the type letter is lifted and characters are laid out on the paper wound on the upper roll.

By miya

It is a Chinese typewriter that goes further. A typewriter maker 'Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturers', a Chinese typewriter classic machine ' Double Pigeon ', was manufactured by the Chinese typewriter which has 2450 print types. Inside it is said to be "small". Its operation is not easy to compliment, and when measuring the input speed it seems that there may be a result saying "100 characters in 2 hours".

By Dadiolli

You can check the actual input in the following movie. Although it can be said that "it is faster to write by hand" literally, it takes a lot of time and effort, but when preparing an official document etc, it is necessary to make a document made as a kitchen with such trouble was.

Crazy Chinese Typewriter - YouTube


Actually, the prototype of Chinese typewriter was made by Japanese people. In the 1920s, the Chinese typewriter "All-purpose type" manufactured by "Japanese typewriter" was brought to China, and then Manchuria Country was born in 1932 and Chinese typewriters became popular at once It was. At that time, there seems to be a model with a print type of 7000 letters too large for large ones.

After that, even after Manchuria Country ended nearly at the same time as the end of the Second World War in 1945, regular versions and copying machines of "all-purpose type" continued to be sold, but then in the 1950's "Double Pigeon (twin 鸽)" that appeared from "Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturers (Shanghai Zhongwu Literature Machine Manufacturing Factory)" was found to be widely used.

A typewriter whose human operator was searching for printed characters with high memory power and writing sentences with complicated machines was a machine that could also be said as "analog polar field". After that, as computers became popular in society, all the prepress process became able to process as digital data, and the era of print was in the past.

In modern times, even if it is in Chinese it is possible to input all Kanji using almost the same keyboard as in Europe and the United States. For input method, input sound like sounds (pinyin) and convert it like "Japanese phonetic symbol input "And" stroke input "for finding characters from unevenness of kanji and others," handwriting recognition "which makes letters recognize by writing with fingers on the screen after smartphones become popular, and" talking with mouth There are types such as "speech recognition" to convert from words that you do to letters, so that anyone can easily create sentences.

Chinese input method - Wikipedia