Chinese character typewriter

Type: Product

As of November 2026, Chinese character typewriter has been mentioned in one podcast episode on Radiolab (Nov 2025).

Typewriters that can type Chinese characters were invented in the early 20th century. Written Chinese is a logographic writing system, and facilitating the use of thousands of Chinese characters requires more complex engineering than for a writing system derived from the Latin alphabet, which may require only tens of glyphs. An ordinary Chinese printing office uses 6,000 characters. Models began to be mass-produced in the 1920s. Many early models were manufactured by Japanese companies, followin