The most revolutionary and rare writing machine was lost in 1940. Until someone received a message

Many may not know, but WRITE MACHINES Not only were they important in the past, the present would not be auctionally similar without these tools. In fact, in 1980 Apple made a decision that few understood: declare him War to the machine to write Several centuries before, in China, someone devised the most revolutionary of all these machines.

The problem is that there was only one and lost. Until now.

Lost keys. THE HISTORY LA had the New York Times. It all started in 2007, when Tom MullaneyProfessor of Chinese History at Stanford, prepared a presentation about the disappearance of Chinese characters and wondered how something printed could be forgotten. That doubt led him to A revelation: How had a writing system as vast as the Chinese mechanized?

He did not remember ever seeing a Chinese typewriter, and when he knocked down in his office to look at old patents, a trip that would last for years began. Discovered that, although scarce, they had existed dozen different models Chinese writing machines, each with ingenious solutions to try to represent thousands of ideograms in a portable frame.

One is missing. From there, Mullaney launched a kind of hunting global: He called collectors, heirs traced on ancestry.com, visited churches, museums, even stores. Over time He gathered a collection Of unique devices, some rescued by very little of oblivion, aware that each one was an unrepeatable piece of the history of mechanized writing.

However, there was a machine that could not find, not even dreaming of recovering: the legendary mingkwai.

The impossible machine. The Mingkwai It was created in the 40s by Lin Yutanga Chinese intellectual based in New York who feared that China, if it did not modernize their way of writing, It would be behind in front of foreign powers. To solve the dilemma of how to represent thousands of characters with a few keys, Lin devised a Revolutionary mechanical system: Any combination of two keys activated gears that showed up to eight possible characters in a central window that baptized as the “magical eye”, allowing the user to choose the right one.

With only 72 keys, Lin had built an interface that allowed to generate tens of thousands of charactersa kind of chimeric keyboard capable of typing an entire universe. He baptized his creation as Mingkwai, which can be translated (freely) as “clear and fast.”

Lost. The problem is that your demonstration before Remington executives It was a disaster: The machine failed and Lin ended up ruined. Along the way, the only prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a Brooklyn printing press.

From there, the trail It was lost. In his book The Chinese Typewriter (2017), Mullaney wrote that it was most likely to have ended in a landfill.

Until, by chance, something extraordinary happened.

The reunion. We arrive at January 2025when Jennifer and Nelson Felix, from Massopequa (New York), reviewed boxes stored after her death. Suddenly, they found A wooden box containing something strange: a typewriter with Chinese keys. Nelson, fond of sale on Facebook, He published some photos In a specialized group without imagining that I was going to detonate a storm of messages.

In less than an hour, hundreds of comments, many in Chinese, shouted at one thing: “Contact Tom!” While giving a talk in Chicago, Mullaney He began to receive a waterfall of notifications. As soon as he saw the photos, the man knew that he had to do with the mingkwai.

Fear of losing it. The Times told that the historian did not feel jubilation with the news, but rather fear. If someone bought it on eBay and turned it into a lamp or a coffee table, it would disappear forever.

What did he do? He wrote to the couple urgently, he told them the history of the machine and asked them to consider sell it to a museum. Jennifer, incredulous, understood in a short time that the object of more than 50 kilos was not just junk. “It was lost half a century,” he explained to Times. “We didn’t want it to be lost again.”

From the basement to the campus. The story charged an unexpected turn when Mullaney discovered that Jennifer’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had worked on Mergenthaler Linotype And he probably saved the scratch machine when he took it with him. For decades, the family had preserved it without knowing what it was.

In April, the couple accepted Sell to Stanfordwhich acquired it thanks to a private donor. When he finally arrived in California, Mullaney witnessed his unpacking with expectation. There, in the University warehouse, he discovered that his mechanism was even more delicate and sophisticated of what I imagined. The machine not only survived: He spokeor something similar. He began to wonder what engineers could discover if they were carefully dismantled. Could, perhaps, replicate it? Does Lin’s thoughts unravel in 1947, when he believed that a typography could save his nation?

A recovered story. The History of the mingkwai It is more than that of the rescue of an exotic and rare machine. If you want, it is even a metaphor of ideas that, without interlocutors, run the risk of disappear forever. Mullaney understood that it was possibly the last one who could understand what these machines represented: the linguistic dilemmas of a civilization, the technological aspirations of a nation then marginalized, or even the desperate elegance of a visionary inventor.

The mingkwai was a device that No one wanted In his time, too advanced already too clumsy, the result of an idea too big for an era that still did not know how to translate it. But when finding it, complete and still capable of astonishing, the professor not only recovered a museum piece: he rescued from oblivion an entire chapter in the history of human writing.

Image | StanfordCampbell, Brobough & Free, American Memory Digital Item Display

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