NY hosts a Chinese type of exhibition

NEW YORK — An exhibition featuring Chinese typewriters and word processors is currently under way in New York, offering unprecedented insight into the stillevolving history of one of the world’s oldest living languages.

The exhibition, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age, explores the historical significance and technological innovation behind Chinese typewriters and the role they played in the survival of the Chinese language in the information age.

For centuries, written Chinese had presented fascinating puzzles for engineers, linguists and entrepreneurs. A Chinese typewriter, which inputs a language with no alphabet, and with more than 70,000 characters, had long been regarded as technologically impossible, according to experts. With help from the global community, China solved these puzzles, enabling the ancient language to continue into the information age.

Several rare typewriters and computers, and an array of typewriter slugs, advertising stamps for newspapers, a movable type cabinet, historic photographs, telegraph code books, typing manuals and related ephemera are on display. Among them is the oldest known Chinese typewriter in the Western hemisphere.

Tom Mullaney, the exhibition’s curator, says that his personal collection — which took him more than a decade to compile — makes up a large part of the exhibition.

Also a professor at Stanford University, Mullaney says the other machines and artifacts on display were the culmination of cross-cultural exchanges between Chinese students studying at American institutions, like New York University, Chinese investors partnering with American corporations, like IBM, and the pioneering work of Chinese-American linguists and technologists.