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Ladies and gentlemen, this should be the biggest news in this channel so far and even this is probably the biggest news in the typewriter collector community. Because a lost Chinese character typewriter re-appeared today. So in this video/article let’s talk about this MingKwai (明快) typewriter.

Who Created it?

So who created this typewriter? and this man was Lin Yutang (林語堂), who was an linguist and author, but the most famous identity was inventor because he invented this great and awesome electric typewriter.

On 17 April 1946, Lin took his design and filed his design for a patent application in the United States and was granted it on 14 October 1952. Finally Lin called his typewriter design “MingKwai” 明快, which means clear and quick. So it might mean that Lin hopes his typewriter can type Chinese characters clearly and quickly.

Why Is the MingKwai Typewriter Such Great?

In the typewriter era, the 19th century and the 20th century, before the computer got popular, not only the Chinese character typewriters but also the Japanese Kanji typewriters, they always had a very serious problem, which was far slower and harder to type the characters than to type the Latin characters. Also, most typewriters always had a very huge character plate or a big roller where so many characters that were usually so tiny were put here. The typist must find the chosen character out and then pick it up and at the end step hit the button. After such steps, the typist was just able to type one character on the paper. Besides these problems, the Chinese typewriters also usually were bigger than the Latin alphabet typewriters.

Therefore, the most obviously great point of the MingKwai typewriter was the smaller body. But I think the most great and revolutionary point was the way of typing it. Very surprisingly it has been very similar to the modern input method on computers nowadays, especially it was more similar to the Radical-based Input Method, such as the Cangjie Input Method and Wubi Input Method.

Every key of the typewriter corresponded to a radical or a certain part of the character. So the radicals could be combined together and the typist would get about 90,000 characters by only hitting several keys on the typewriter and even there was “magic eye” in the center of the keyboard, when the typist typed, he could review the selected character by watching this “magic eye”.

But, unfortunately because of some things in business or other factors, this very smart invention did not make it into production and at the same time, Lin Yutang had fallen into debt after developing this typewriter. So in the end, Lin only made one MingKwai typewriter as the prototype.

How Does It Re-appear?

With the time going, the world moved to computer time and typewriters gradually were replaced by computers. Typing Chinese characters gradually wasn’t a difficult thing by using the input methods on computers or cellphones. So in such a background, the MingKwai typewriter became a forgotten thing and that prototype was also lost in history.

However, until 24th January, 2025, in a Facebook Group, whose name is “What’s My Typewriter Worth?”, a net friend suddenly sent a post because he found a very rare typewriter that’s all in Chinese while clearing out his wife’s grandfather's basement. After studying, he knew this was the MingKwai typewriter. Quickly this post got hundreds of likes. Compared with other posts that only can have several or about a dozen likes, this post went viral in the community instantly and it should have more value and be very powerful for everyone.

I heard that now there have been some people and a Chinese team who want to replicate this typewriter wanting to buy it and they have contacted the publisher of this post. Currently, the discoverer has decided to rent a climate-controlled warehouse to preserve the Mingkwai typewriter and is preparing to sell it to "the right person".The famous American sinologist Thomas Mullaney (墨磊寧) even expressed the appreciation for this.

So this is today’s video/article and thank you for watching. Hope one day we can see this precious typewriter or its replica that can work again and let’s see how to type the Character with it. Hope you can like this video/article. Have a good day. See you next time. Bye.

reference:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15hKnDQ4RP/

https://www.threads.net/@aaron_yodel/post/DFP4bQiyq6-?xmt=AQGzwQHqU9IlHKGwH4vmiALUmulGGTn6RKkHf_npw0Q8TQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_typewriter

https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20250126A05VGV00

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https://youtu.be/JZcui85b4EE?si=seI6PV6fE7AUL_M5

https://youtu.be/T71M23ZiwUE?si=QxgvvwXRQibLfAAq

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https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20230407A07HJF00

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2613795A/en

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