AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

Invited contribution by Gigi Chang, assistant curator of China Design Now exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2008.

A Chinese typewriter was specially acquired for the V&A exhibition China Design Now (2008) to illustrate the uniqueness and complexity of Chinese typography.  It was pure good fortune that we managed to find one.  We were on a research trip in China, visiting a fashion designer's showroom in Shanghai.  On the same street, there were a number of shabby-looking antique shops.  Nestled amongst table lamps and chairs and in the middle of this narrow street sat a Chinese typewriter!  We had been looking for such a typewriter for a long time, and were about to formally borrow one from a Shenzhen-based graphic designer, so without hesitation we purchased it with the intention of acquiring it for the Museum's permanent collection. 

Chinese characters could be such a mystery to someone unfamiliar with the language.  For the exhibition, we felt it was important to find a object that could anchor the graphic design works on show, especially those dealing with Chinese typography.  A Chinese typewriter does the job very well, as the shape faintly recalls western typewriters (especially the roller), whilst the tray with its thousands of character helps to visually elucidate how Chinese characters come about in print. 

Typing in Chinese before widespread computerisation was a specialist skill.  A Chinese typewriter does not have a keyboard, but instead uses a tray that contains over 2,000 characters, arranged according to 214 groups of meaning classifiers (the building blocks, or bushou, of characters). Several thousand more would be available on a second tray.  The typist first aligns the tray and then presses a key, which makes an arm pick up each desired character in turn and strike it against the paper.  It is a time-consuming process, however professional typists could average 3,500 characters per hour.

Gigi Chang

Link to a Taiwanese blog with good photos - 'memory of mother as a typist': http://jasonblog.tw/2009/06/memory-about-chinese-typewriter.html

V&A China Design Now original exhibition website: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1636_chinadesignnow/the-exhibition

A touring version of the exhibition is showing at Portland Art Museum (Oregon) until 17 January 2010: http://portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/feature/China-Design-Now

Mechanised writing systems were first developed as writing aids to those who were blind or had impaired vision.  These systems included the ‘typographer,’ designed by William Burt in 1829, whereby the user turned a dial to select keys and the ‘chirographer’ designed by William Thurber in 1845.  The need for  an automated system was more widespread, however, with stenographers and telegraphers in popular demand for their efficiency in communication.  In 1865 the first marketable version of the typewriter was patented by Rev. Rasmus Malling in Denmark and became known as the ‘Hansen Writing Ball.’

Two years later in Wisconsin, Christopher Soles, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule put their design for the ‘QWERTY’ typewriter into production with Remington (a company then famous for its manufacture of sewing machines).  By 1910, this design had become the standard throughout the industry.  Early designs often featured floral patterns in order to appeal to the vast number of female secretaries and typists who used them.  The typewriter soon broke through this stereotype and became popular with journalists, novelists and in the home.  In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mina famously records her tale using a typewriter; she transcribes every letter and document in order to standardise and make legible the disparate elements of her story.

The electrification of the typewriter was investigated as early as 1870, as Edison experimented with relaying typed information down a telegraph line.  It was not until nearly a century later that this idea was popularised.  Indeed, electrification was the death knell of the mechanical typewriter, with electronic keyboards taking their place.  Today the romantic notion of ‘typecasting’ keeps the typewriter alive (a process where bloggers type their posts and scan the results onto a computer), as do collectors (who famously count Tom Hanks among their number.

Rebecca Harrison