10 JUN 2021

The typewriter as protagonist: India’s new age of technology, 1890–1920

Typewriters are special kinds of ‘things’: they have a voice, a signature, a generative power of their own. They are ‘things’ that produce ‘things’. They are also harbingers of a transformative techno-modernity, in which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards a cluster of small machines — the camera, bicycle, sewing machine, gramophone, typewriter — began to isolate, mimic, and augment specific human functions. Combining ‘thing theory’ with the discursive and material idioms of modernity, this presentation asks what makes typewriters special and in particular poses this question in relation to society, politics, and the techno-culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. It ponders the semantic significance of the hyphenated hybrid ‘type-writer’ and the use (before the rise of the ‘typist’) of the term ‘typewriter’ to designate both the machine and the person who operates it.

The presentation further examines how, in contrast to standard notions of ‘colonial knowledge’, India reacted to an assertive American take on modernity — with typewriters as the stylish exemplars of speed, uniformity, and efficiency, from the re-gendering (and re-racializing) of office work, through technological mobility and physical portability, vernacularization and commercialization, to newspaper advertising and brand recognition. The typewriter spawned a new pedagogy, with secretarial courses, business schools, instruction manuals, and sales leaflets. It stimulated new levels of functional literacy, office and business skills. It also necessitated new forms of technical expertise, from the typewriter repairman to the handwriting and typewriter specialist of the Criminal Investigation Department. These overarching dynamics are read against two specific episodes — the Parsi postcard case of 1915 and the Lahore conspiracy case of 1914 — which highlight the internal tensions and contradictory impulses in India’s emergent typewriter culture.

△ The Parsi homoeopath at Princess Street, Mumbai. (Photograph copyright Chirodeep Chaudhuri, image from Sidharth Bhatia (ed.) With great truth and regard: the story of the typewriter in India. Mumbai: Godrej/Roli Books, 2016)

David Arnold is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal contribution to typewriter scholarship is Everyday technology: machines and the making of India’s modernity (2013), which also considers bicycles, sewing machines, and rice mills. His earlier work has ranged widely over the history of medicine, science, technology, and the environment in modern South Asia, including Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India (1993) and The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape, and science, 1800-1856 (2005). His latest book, Burning the dead: Hindu nationhood and the global construction of Indian tradition (2021), discusses cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora, but the ‘everyday’ in technology remains an abiding interest.

14 JUL 2021

A typewriter with no keys: the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective

The transition from movable type to typewriting, and then from typewriting to computing, was experienced in dramatically different ways depending on the language in question. For English, the transition from letterpress to typewriting was marked by a technological schism. With the introduction of the keyboard, and with metal typefaces being moved largely out of sight, and into the chassis of the machine, typewriting bore little resemblance to the act of movable type composition. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was a relatively seamless one for English speakers. Not only did the keyboard stay the same, but so did the logic of textual production: to produce the letter ‘X’ on an IBM PC monitor, one depressed the letter ‘X’ on the keyboard – just like one did in the age of Remington. What you type is what you get.

These same transitions were completely different in the context of Chinese. Chinese typewriters continued to feature metal character slugs, with the exact same dimensions as those found in Chinese movable type. There was no keyboard on a Chinese typewriter, moreover, with typists looking directly at a tray bed of approximately 2500 metallic slugs, each a Chinese character or symbol in mirror image. For Chinese, that is to say, the letterpress-typewriting transition was marked by continuity, so much so that some referred to Chinese typewriters as ‘tabletop printing presses’. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was one of rupture for Chinese. Not only did Chinese computing introduce the mechanism of the keyboard for the first time, but it introduced an entirely new logic of textual production: input, where what you type is never what you get. In this talk, Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney will provide an overview of the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective.

△ With its signature pale green color, the ‘Double Pigeon’-brand Chinese typewriter was the emblematic typewriter of the post-1949 era. Produced by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory, it was manufactured from the 1950s well into the 1980s and early 1990s. (Image courtesy of SFO Airport Museum)

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author or lead editor of six books, including The Chinese typewriter: a history (2017), Your computer is on fire (2021), and the forthcoming The Chinese computer – the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He directs Digital Humanities Asia (DHAsia), a program at Stanford University focused on East, South, Southeast, and Inner/Central Asia, and is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Dissertation Reviews.

11 AUG 2021

Tibetan typewriters: from promotional stunt to educational tool

In this talk Jo will examine the history of three different kinds of Tibetan typewriters, explore the design styles of their typefaces, and discuss the intricacies of typesetting text on these machines. Although the earliest typewriter for the Tibetan script (a Tibetan version of the VariTyper) was hardly ever used, its legacy has meant that we are still more or less using its input system for keying-in Tibetan text on present-day computer keyboards, with contemporary digital fonts. The second Tibetan typewriter was merely a personal academic tool of a University professor at his office in Hamburg (Germany), and it was the desktop device invented by Tibetan scholar Nagwang Thondup Narkyid in Dharamsala (McLeod Ganj, India) that became instrumental for typesetting educational works used in the teaching of the Tibetan language and script to beginners and higher-level students.

While in theory the development of typewriters made Tibetan typesetting available to the public, its use was not widespread. By the beginning of the 1990s most publishing houses working with Tibetan texts had shifted to using the first digital Tibetan typefaces on personal computers as the standard for typesetting their publications, and the Tibetan typewriter soon became redundant. However, the quest for a mechanical device to typeset Tibetan before the digital age offers insights into several interesting aspects of the history of design, technology, and typographic experimentation.

△ Tibetan typewriter keyboard of the Godrej Prima model, produced by the firm of Godrej & Boyce, Mumbai c.1980s/90s (Image courtesy of Contextual Alternate)

Jo De Baerdemaeker is an independent Belgian typeface designer and researcher. He holds an MA in Typeface Design as well as a PhD from the University of Reading. He is the author of the book Tibetan typeforms: an historical and visual analysis of Tibetan typefaces (2020). He currently teaches at LUCA School of Arts (campus Sint-Lucas Gent), is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Royal Asiatic Society (London), and is a guest professor at various international art programmes and universities. In 2012 he founded Studio Type in Antwerp, a design studio collaborating with international design agencies and type foundries. In 2020 Jo was elected Vice-President of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale).

22 SEP 2021

Typewriters and the making of the modern script regime

Soon after the commercialization of the first successful Latin typewriter in 1874, it became common for documents written with Latin characters – in languages such as English, French, Dutch, Italian, and German – to be typed. For decades after that, however, documents written using the Arabic script, Chinese, Devanagari, and other scripts continued to be handwritten. Erasing this gap between typewritten Latin-script documents and their handwritten others was a priority for many anti-colonial movements and the postcolonial states that succeeded them. For some states like Turkey, Vietnam, or Indonesia that used Latin characters to write their national languages, modified Latin typewriters would do. For others, the indigenous language had to be typed in scripts other than the Latin alphabet. The invention and commercialization of typewriters for scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Devanagari was part of the transformation from a world in which most people applied for a government document (such as passport) using Latin characters to a world in which most do so using non-Latin characters. In other words, the development of non-Latin typewriters is part of the modern history of the global script regime, which saw some languages adopt the Latin script while others maintained, adapted, or invented various other scripts. This talk explores the modern global script regime through the history of typewriters for the Arabic, Chinese, and Devanagari scripts.

△ Illustrations from two patents, one for an Arabic typewriter submitted by Selim S. Haddad in 1899 (left) and the other for a Japanese typewriter submitted by Sugimoto Kyota in 1916 (right). These and other patents show both the challenges to manufacturing non-Latin typewriters and the growing demand for machines for different scripts. (Image courtesy of Google Patents)

Raja Adal is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, with a PhD from Harvard University. His publications include Beauty in the age of empire: Japan, Egypt, and the global history of aesthetic education (2019), ‘Aesthetics and the end of the mimetic moment: the introduction of art education in Japanese and Egyptian schools’ (Comparative Studies in Society and History) and ‘Japan’s bifurcated modernity: writing and calligraphy in Japanese public schools, 1872–1943’ (Theory, Culture, and Society). He has been the recipient of grants from various organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Foundation for the Promotion of Science, and the Hakuho Foundation. He is currently working on a book about the material history of scripts and writing technologies in the twentieth century.