July 16, 2025 • 14 mins
Tom Mullaney is professor of history and of East Asian languages at Stanford, and he has one of the most awesomely nerdy areas of interest and research that I've seen in a long time: Chinese typewriters and early Chinese computers (not necessarily electronic)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is going to be just a absolutely fabulous conversation.
So let's nerd out together a little bit. You know
that I do a lot of science on this show.
You know, I'm a big time nerd in addition to
being president of the Bad Analogy Club. And I saw
a story the other day that absolutely fascinated me, and
(00:22):
a story out of out of Stanford about something called
a ming kwi. And it's one word with a capital
letter in the middle though m I n G capital
kwai proto type that was discovered it's now it's Stanford,
and this whole thing is so crazy.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And Tom Alaney is a.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Professor of history and East Asian Languages at Stanford, but
he is really really nerdy as well.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
And I mean that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
As the highest compliment, because this dude is x on
Chinese typewriters and primitive Chinese computers. So first of all, Tom,
I very much apologize for the delay getting to you.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Absolutely no problem, it's a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Tell us what the heck is a ming kwi?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Sure, well, I invite your listeners to try to imagine
fitting one hundred thousand Chinese characters on a quirdy keyboard
on the laptop in front of them. So on an
English language keyboard, you've got say twenty six letters. You have,
you know, upper case, lowercase, You've got plenty of keys
to fit them on, so you get a one to
(01:39):
one ratio. I hit the letter K, and I see
the K on the screen, and it.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
All is done. Chinese has no alphabet.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
It's the one major language, not the only language, but
the only major world language that has no alphabet or celebary.
It's character based, and there are about one hundred thousand characters.
So then imagine the engineering puzzle of how do you
fit one hundred thousand characters onto a tabletop device? And
the answer is if you use the starting point of
(02:07):
the Western typewriter and really of kind of western human
computer interaction.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
You can't get there from here. You would have a
keyboard the size of a building.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
And so you need, you know, you need to think
not just outside the box, you have to think outside
of Well, I'll let you fill in the analogy here,
But the men Kwi did it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
The men Kwi is for.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Any viewer that our listener, excuse me, that googles it.
You'll see it looks like it looks like a Remington
typewriter from the nineteen thirties, same size, and it's got
you know, a few dozen keys, but it's able to
type ninety thousand Chinese characters. And it achieved this through
an absolute feat of engineering, reimagination, linguistics. It's an unbelievable device.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So I realized the answer is probably much longer than
we have time for. But give me a short version
of the answer. How this works in the sense that,
as you said, and then I have my keyboard here
right in front of me. If I hit the letter K,
I see a K on the screen. If I hold
down shift and hit the letter K, I see a
capital K on the screen. But that's that's about it.
(03:21):
That's about all I can do with that key. So
on the men QUI, at least with the first key
that I hit, since it's not trying to be by
itself one out of one hundred thousand characters, that's got
to be doing something other than putting the character on
the page.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Yeah, So what what you could think of men Kui
is a filing cabinet, and the keyboard is the instructions
you're giving the machine to go find the character in
the filing cabinet that you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
So inside the machine are.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
These these metal bars that have all of these thousands
and thousands of Chinese characters on them. The user doesn't
see those, those are sort of hidden from the user.
What the user is is when the user touches a key,
if we put it into kind of anthropomorphic terms, it's
like the user saying, hey, machine, please go into your memory,
(04:19):
your filing cabinet, and bring back a Chinese character that
matches the criteria that I'm giving you with these key strokes.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
It's a it's like an information.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Retrieval system in technically speaking, when you push the letter,
when you push the button marked K, and it gives
you K on the screen. A Western computer a computer
is doing the same thing. It's just that it's much
more straightforward. But what a Chinese computer user but also
min Kwai is doing is saying, Okay, I have a
character in mind, I know the one that I want,
(04:53):
and I'm going to give instructions to the machine to
go into its memory find and fetch the character that
I want, and then give me one chance to look
at them before we confirm, like, let me double check it. Yes,
you found the right one and only then are you
going to print it to the page. So it's an
incredibly sophisticated information retrieval system that is hiding as a typewriter.
(05:16):
And that's why we call it the origin of Chinese
computing because by now with one point en billion computer
Internet e commerce users operating in Chinese, this is the
principles that were laid down.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
In men Kwi.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Is how every not some, not a majority, every Chinese
computing interaction takes place. Every Chinese computing interaction is using
the Quirity keyboard or a trackpad to retrieve information from
a database. Not what you type is what you get
type of a relationship. Okay, let's dig into this a
little further. Let's say let's say I want the character
(05:52):
for Kat. I assume there's a character for.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Cat yep, mau okay, and so is it mal.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Not the same the same spelling as maltodom, but a
different character. It's the same same sound, But.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Does it come from the onomenopoeia of the sound that
Cat makes or is that just coincidental?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
That is coincidental.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
So most Chinese characters, as an aside, are actually not pictographs.
They are most of them actually do have a phonetic
element to it. It's just imagine taking the word, uh,
you know, I like a picture of the human eye
and say, okay, this is this is this is a pictograph.
It represents the eye. But we have this other word
(06:35):
in the English language called I like I, you me et, cetera.
And so I'm going to steal the symbol of the
eye and use it. It's called it's called rebus. It's
the origin of all vocabulary in all languages. I'm gonna
steal the sound of this symbol. But now I've got
a problem because if someone's reading it, they don't know
do I mean the human eye or I. So I'm
(06:56):
gonna add like a little extra feature to it. I'm
gonna stick a little extra on the picture of the
eye so that anyone reading it knows like, oh, that's
the you me I, not the wow I knows I.
That's how Chinese characters are built. So in the case
of a if you were trying to find if you
were using min kui to try to type the word
for cat mole, you you would have in your mind
(07:19):
a picture of the character. In your mind's eye. You're like, okay,
I know what it looks like, and I know what
pieces it's built out of. And then I look down
at my keyboard and the first key I strike is
one of those pieces, one of the pieces of the
actual physical like you know what the character looks like,
not it sound in men Kui. And then the second
(07:39):
character I'm gonna push is another kind of structural feature
of the character.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
And what the machine is going to do is say, Okay,
I got you.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
This user, this type is wants me to go back
into my memory and find all of the characters that
I have in memory that match that criteria. Now there's
going to be more than one, and so I need
a chance to give the user away to say oh no, no,
not that one, that one. And that's why the men
Kwi featured the world's first ever pop up menu. The
world's first pop up menu was not Xerox Park and Computation.
(08:11):
It was actually the men Kwhi. It's this little rectangular
glass window on the top of the machine, and after
the user touched two keys, the machine would present back
to the typist eight Chinese characters that fulfilled the criteria
they had just given. And then the users like boom,
I want number four or I want number six, And
so you would type two keys that somehow matched the
(08:33):
shape of the Chinese character for male, for kat, Kat
would be somewhere in the list of eight options that
the machine gave back to you, and then you would
push one last key numbers one through eight to select
which one you wanted. Believe that is how Chinese computing
works now, and Japanese computing and Korean computing.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
By the way, we're talking with professor Tom mulaney from
Stanford who's got a book called the Chinese Typewriter.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
By the way, this is so fat Okay, So I'm
a nerd, So just let me get a little nerdy
with you here.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
So let's say Mao is made up of, well, how
many different parts would you say that particular symbol is
made character is made of?
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Well, that's the.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Cool thing is it's it's it's in the eye of
the beholder. So the inventor of mean Kui made up
his own way of breaking characters into pieces. But if
you follow sort of the standard dictionaries of the day,
there were about two hundred ways to two hundred pieces
out of which all Chinese characters are built.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
There it's like somewhere of that.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
All right.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
So what I'm getting at then is let's just say,
for example, that MAO is made up of four pieces.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
And I don't know if it is, but let's just
say that it is.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
So if I wanted to type that character on ming Kwi,
must I for my first key stroke hit, let's say
the part of the character that is furthest left or
furthest right.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Well, got it, you got it. That was the system.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
It was called basically like you sometime think they did top.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Bottom so you did not have to enter.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
You did not like so when you if you write
the word cat, you can't write ce t and be like, ah,
that's close enough. I'll call it a day. You got
to give us all the pieces of c at. You
got to give us all or you've misspelled it. For
an information retrieval system, you don't have to give me
every piece of it. You just have to give me
enough so that the machine can find what you want.
(10:28):
And so in his case, he's like, no, no, no, no,
I don't want you. I don't want the typeist to
have to give me all four parts or all six parts,
or all seven parts or all two parts.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Just give me, the.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Very first part that someone would write when writing it
by hand or by brush, and the very last thing
they would do in a brush.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Over that, that's all I need.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So yeah, you were talking.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Before about how you were talking before about how an
aspect of this is kind of like the first ever
pop up menu. What you just described is kind of
like the first ever auto complete.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Autocompletion was invented in Chinese computing about forty decade or
soon four decades before Western computing. The first ever Chinese
computer made it MIT in nineteen fifty nine had.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Autocomplete built in. Wow, been autocomplete built in.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
And that's because I mean, they were geniuses, the one
the folks working on it. But it comes back to
the idea that this is the premise of Chinese computing,
Japanese computing.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Creating.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Computing is information retrieval, So I don't need to It's
not spelling. I'm not spelling out the word. I'm not
writing out the word. I'm giving a machine just enough
information to find the word I want, and that's often
much less than what is needed to spell the word.
(11:47):
It takes a fewer keystrokes to find the word xylophone
than to spell the word xylophone.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
All right, I got about two minutes left here, and
I just want to spend this part talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
The machine itself.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As I read some of the story, it seemed like
there was knowledge that this machine had existed, but nobody
had one, or something like that. And then suddenly here
it is, and now you've got it. You've probably typed
on it yourself, you know. Tell us a little about
the history of this physical one device.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah, yeah, So this is more rare than the Gutenberg Bible.
It's more rare than the Enigma machine. It's one of
a kind. It's the only one ever ever made, so
its debut in nineteen forty seven. We have historic footage
of it working, we have photographs, ar Chibal documents, and
except for the inventor, I'm the person on planet Earth
that knows this machine like I have studied this for
(12:43):
now about more than a third of my life, and
I was absolutely certain it was gone, forever gone. And
we knew even the moment when it should have been gone,
which is when the mrgenthal Or Linotype company that helped
manufacture it, based in Brooklyn, they moved offices and they're
probably cleaning house. And it's even recorded that that's the
moment when it went missing and then was never heard
(13:04):
from again. And I'm a little bit of a detective.
I can find anything and anyone. It's just I should
go work for the FEDS. But and I've been looking
for this thing. And after, you know, first time, not
finding it, the hundredth time, not finding it the five
hundred times, you say, well, maybe there's another chance. After
the thousands here like it's gone. And then it shows
up in a basement in upstate New York. And I
(13:26):
got pinged, I don't know one hundred times on Facebook
and elsewhere like have you seen this?
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Have you seen this?
Speaker 4 (13:32):
And I was in Chicago at the time in a
hotel because I was giving a talk the next day
at the university, as like this is this isn't happening,
This can't be real, and lo and behold it surfaced.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Just remarkable.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Professor Tom mulaney from Stanford his book is called The
Chinese Typewriter. And I've got a whole bunch of links
and actually videos on my blog today at Rosscominski dot
com about this. Some of Tom's other talks as well
that are just absolutely fascinating. This whole thing just just
blew me away. I'm so grateful for you making some
time for us, Professor.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I know you're a really busy guy. So much I
appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Thanks so much. Good talking to you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Okay, you too, you too. Thank you
This is going to be just a absolutely fabulous conversation.
So let's nerd out together a little bit. You know
that I do a lot of science on this show.
You know, I'm a big time nerd in addition to
being president of the Bad Analogy Club. And I saw
a story the other day that absolutely fascinated me, and
(00:22):
a story out of out of Stanford about something called
a ming kwi. And it's one word with a capital
letter in the middle though m I n G capital
kwai proto type that was discovered it's now it's Stanford,
and this whole thing is so crazy.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And Tom Alaney is a.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Professor of history and East Asian Languages at Stanford, but
he is really really nerdy as well.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
And I mean that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
As the highest compliment, because this dude is x on
Chinese typewriters and primitive Chinese computers. So first of all, Tom,
I very much apologize for the delay getting to you.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Absolutely no problem, it's a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Tell us what the heck is a ming kwi?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Sure, well, I invite your listeners to try to imagine
fitting one hundred thousand Chinese characters on a quirdy keyboard
on the laptop in front of them. So on an
English language keyboard, you've got say twenty six letters. You have,
you know, upper case, lowercase, You've got plenty of keys
to fit them on, so you get a one to
(01:39):
one ratio. I hit the letter K, and I see
the K on the screen, and it.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
All is done. Chinese has no alphabet.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
It's the one major language, not the only language, but
the only major world language that has no alphabet or celebary.
It's character based, and there are about one hundred thousand characters.
So then imagine the engineering puzzle of how do you
fit one hundred thousand characters onto a tabletop device? And
the answer is if you use the starting point of
(02:07):
the Western typewriter and really of kind of western human
computer interaction.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
You can't get there from here. You would have a
keyboard the size of a building.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
And so you need, you know, you need to think
not just outside the box, you have to think outside
of Well, I'll let you fill in the analogy here,
But the men Kwi did it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
The men Kwi is for.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Any viewer that our listener, excuse me, that googles it.
You'll see it looks like it looks like a Remington
typewriter from the nineteen thirties, same size, and it's got
you know, a few dozen keys, but it's able to
type ninety thousand Chinese characters. And it achieved this through
an absolute feat of engineering, reimagination, linguistics. It's an unbelievable device.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So I realized the answer is probably much longer than
we have time for. But give me a short version
of the answer. How this works in the sense that,
as you said, and then I have my keyboard here
right in front of me. If I hit the letter K,
I see a K on the screen. If I hold
down shift and hit the letter K, I see a
capital K on the screen. But that's that's about it.
(03:21):
That's about all I can do with that key. So
on the men QUI, at least with the first key
that I hit, since it's not trying to be by
itself one out of one hundred thousand characters, that's got
to be doing something other than putting the character on
the page.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Yeah, So what what you could think of men Kui
is a filing cabinet, and the keyboard is the instructions
you're giving the machine to go find the character in
the filing cabinet that you're looking for.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
So inside the machine are.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
These these metal bars that have all of these thousands
and thousands of Chinese characters on them. The user doesn't
see those, those are sort of hidden from the user.
What the user is is when the user touches a key,
if we put it into kind of anthropomorphic terms, it's
like the user saying, hey, machine, please go into your memory,
(04:19):
your filing cabinet, and bring back a Chinese character that
matches the criteria that I'm giving you with these key strokes.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
It's a it's like an information.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Retrieval system in technically speaking, when you push the letter,
when you push the button marked K, and it gives
you K on the screen. A Western computer a computer
is doing the same thing. It's just that it's much
more straightforward. But what a Chinese computer user but also
min Kwai is doing is saying, Okay, I have a
character in mind, I know the one that I want,
(04:53):
and I'm going to give instructions to the machine to
go into its memory find and fetch the character that
I want, and then give me one chance to look
at them before we confirm, like, let me double check it. Yes,
you found the right one and only then are you
going to print it to the page. So it's an
incredibly sophisticated information retrieval system that is hiding as a typewriter.
(05:16):
And that's why we call it the origin of Chinese
computing because by now with one point en billion computer
Internet e commerce users operating in Chinese, this is the
principles that were laid down.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
In men Kwi.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Is how every not some, not a majority, every Chinese
computing interaction takes place. Every Chinese computing interaction is using
the Quirity keyboard or a trackpad to retrieve information from
a database. Not what you type is what you get
type of a relationship. Okay, let's dig into this a
little further. Let's say let's say I want the character
(05:52):
for Kat. I assume there's a character for.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Cat yep, mau okay, and so is it mal.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
Not the same the same spelling as maltodom, but a
different character. It's the same same sound, But.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Does it come from the onomenopoeia of the sound that
Cat makes or is that just coincidental?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
That is coincidental.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
So most Chinese characters, as an aside, are actually not pictographs.
They are most of them actually do have a phonetic
element to it. It's just imagine taking the word, uh,
you know, I like a picture of the human eye
and say, okay, this is this is this is a pictograph.
It represents the eye. But we have this other word
(06:35):
in the English language called I like I, you me et, cetera.
And so I'm going to steal the symbol of the
eye and use it. It's called it's called rebus. It's
the origin of all vocabulary in all languages. I'm gonna
steal the sound of this symbol. But now I've got
a problem because if someone's reading it, they don't know
do I mean the human eye or I. So I'm
(06:56):
gonna add like a little extra feature to it. I'm
gonna stick a little extra on the picture of the
eye so that anyone reading it knows like, oh, that's
the you me I, not the wow I knows I.
That's how Chinese characters are built. So in the case
of a if you were trying to find if you
were using min kui to try to type the word
for cat mole, you you would have in your mind
(07:19):
a picture of the character. In your mind's eye. You're like, okay,
I know what it looks like, and I know what
pieces it's built out of. And then I look down
at my keyboard and the first key I strike is
one of those pieces, one of the pieces of the
actual physical like you know what the character looks like,
not it sound in men Kui. And then the second
(07:39):
character I'm gonna push is another kind of structural feature
of the character.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
And what the machine is going to do is say, Okay,
I got you.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
This user, this type is wants me to go back
into my memory and find all of the characters that
I have in memory that match that criteria. Now there's
going to be more than one, and so I need
a chance to give the user away to say oh no, no,
not that one, that one. And that's why the men
Kwi featured the world's first ever pop up menu. The
world's first pop up menu was not Xerox Park and Computation.
(08:11):
It was actually the men Kwhi. It's this little rectangular
glass window on the top of the machine, and after
the user touched two keys, the machine would present back
to the typist eight Chinese characters that fulfilled the criteria
they had just given. And then the users like boom,
I want number four or I want number six, And
so you would type two keys that somehow matched the
(08:33):
shape of the Chinese character for male, for kat, Kat
would be somewhere in the list of eight options that
the machine gave back to you, and then you would
push one last key numbers one through eight to select
which one you wanted. Believe that is how Chinese computing
works now, and Japanese computing and Korean computing.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
By the way, we're talking with professor Tom mulaney from
Stanford who's got a book called the Chinese Typewriter.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
By the way, this is so fat Okay, So I'm
a nerd, So just let me get a little nerdy
with you here.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
So let's say Mao is made up of, well, how
many different parts would you say that particular symbol is
made character is made of?
Speaker 3 (09:14):
Well, that's the.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Cool thing is it's it's it's in the eye of
the beholder. So the inventor of mean Kui made up
his own way of breaking characters into pieces. But if
you follow sort of the standard dictionaries of the day,
there were about two hundred ways to two hundred pieces
out of which all Chinese characters are built.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
There it's like somewhere of that.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
All right.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
So what I'm getting at then is let's just say,
for example, that MAO is made up of four pieces.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
And I don't know if it is, but let's just
say that it is.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
So if I wanted to type that character on ming Kwi,
must I for my first key stroke hit, let's say
the part of the character that is furthest left or
furthest right.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Well, got it, you got it. That was the system.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
It was called basically like you sometime think they did top.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Bottom so you did not have to enter.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
You did not like so when you if you write
the word cat, you can't write ce t and be like, ah,
that's close enough. I'll call it a day. You got
to give us all the pieces of c at. You
got to give us all or you've misspelled it. For
an information retrieval system, you don't have to give me
every piece of it. You just have to give me
enough so that the machine can find what you want.
(10:28):
And so in his case, he's like, no, no, no, no,
I don't want you. I don't want the typeist to
have to give me all four parts or all six parts,
or all seven parts or all two parts.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Just give me, the.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
Very first part that someone would write when writing it
by hand or by brush, and the very last thing
they would do in a brush.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Over that, that's all I need.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So yeah, you were talking.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Before about how you were talking before about how an
aspect of this is kind of like the first ever
pop up menu. What you just described is kind of
like the first ever auto complete.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Autocompletion was invented in Chinese computing about forty decade or
soon four decades before Western computing. The first ever Chinese
computer made it MIT in nineteen fifty nine had.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Autocomplete built in. Wow, been autocomplete built in.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
And that's because I mean, they were geniuses, the one
the folks working on it. But it comes back to
the idea that this is the premise of Chinese computing,
Japanese computing.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Creating.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Computing is information retrieval, So I don't need to It's
not spelling. I'm not spelling out the word. I'm not
writing out the word. I'm giving a machine just enough
information to find the word I want, and that's often
much less than what is needed to spell the word.
(11:47):
It takes a fewer keystrokes to find the word xylophone
than to spell the word xylophone.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
All right, I got about two minutes left here, and
I just want to spend this part talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
The machine itself.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As I read some of the story, it seemed like
there was knowledge that this machine had existed, but nobody
had one, or something like that. And then suddenly here
it is, and now you've got it. You've probably typed
on it yourself, you know. Tell us a little about
the history of this physical one device.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah, yeah, So this is more rare than the Gutenberg Bible.
It's more rare than the Enigma machine. It's one of
a kind. It's the only one ever ever made, so
its debut in nineteen forty seven. We have historic footage
of it working, we have photographs, ar Chibal documents, and
except for the inventor, I'm the person on planet Earth
that knows this machine like I have studied this for
(12:43):
now about more than a third of my life, and
I was absolutely certain it was gone, forever gone. And
we knew even the moment when it should have been gone,
which is when the mrgenthal Or Linotype company that helped
manufacture it, based in Brooklyn, they moved offices and they're
probably cleaning house. And it's even recorded that that's the
moment when it went missing and then was never heard
(13:04):
from again. And I'm a little bit of a detective.
I can find anything and anyone. It's just I should
go work for the FEDS. But and I've been looking
for this thing. And after, you know, first time, not
finding it, the hundredth time, not finding it the five
hundred times, you say, well, maybe there's another chance. After
the thousands here like it's gone. And then it shows
up in a basement in upstate New York. And I
(13:26):
got pinged, I don't know one hundred times on Facebook
and elsewhere like have you seen this?
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Have you seen this?
Speaker 4 (13:32):
And I was in Chicago at the time in a
hotel because I was giving a talk the next day
at the university, as like this is this isn't happening,
This can't be real, and lo and behold it surfaced.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Just remarkable.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Professor Tom mulaney from Stanford his book is called The
Chinese Typewriter. And I've got a whole bunch of links
and actually videos on my blog today at Rosscominski dot
com about this. Some of Tom's other talks as well
that are just absolutely fascinating. This whole thing just just
blew me away. I'm so grateful for you making some
time for us, Professor.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I know you're a really busy guy. So much I
appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Thanks so much. Good talking to you.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Okay, you too, you too. Thank you
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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