*Sounds impossible, but would Stanford lie?
http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/chinesetypewriter
(...)
Mullaney’s research began in 2006, when he was organizing a speaker series on the subject of disappearance. “In writing the capstone essay for the series, I touched on the issue of the disappearance of certain Chinese characters over time.” In discussing how printing presses decided on which characters to include and which to leave out, Mullaney realized that the same could be said for typewriters. “Did China have typewriters? I had no idea,” he says.
After spending some time searching the Internet, Mullaney made an amazing discovery: as early at the turn of the 20th-century, patent records were in existence for Chinese typewriter designs. The more he dug, the more evidence for Chinese typewriters he found.
Mullaney describes his initial research as a period of breathless excitement. “I might find a cache of 20 patent documents, within which would be the names of other companies that were collaborating or funding the development of Chinese typewriters, or other patent documents.’” After following these leads, another 100 documents might appear, which, in turn, would produce another set of sources.
Through his research, Mullaney discovered a “golden era” in Chinese typewriter production between the 30s and early 50s. During this period, the proliferation of printing had political implications in the ease in which flyers and pamphlets could be mass-produced. During the subsequent twenty years, inventors both in China and abroad continued to design increasingly complex machines, revolutionizing Chinese office work and gaining popular commercial appeal....
