Chinese typewriter. Printing machines from China

Math quiz for elementary school.

An interesting and informative quiz for junior and middle school students.

All quiz questions with answers.

Quiz "Mathematical"

Quiz questions

■ What shape has no corners? Answer: Circle.

■ What do 12 months add up? Answer: Year.

■ How many characters are in a Chinese typewriter? Answer: Five thousand.

■ What alphabet has two characters? Answer: Morse code (dash and dot).

■ Winnie the Pooh and Piglet found one mushroom each, and Winnie the Pooh did it earlier than Piglet. Which mushroom did each of them find in a row? Answer: Winnie the Pooh is the first mushroom, Piglet is the second.

■ How much did the Romans cost? Answer: Family (I - 1.V - 5, X - 10, L - 50, C - 100, D -500, M - 1000).

■ What number has as many letters as numbers? Answer: In 100.

■ I have three kilograms of sweets in my bag, and my friend has three kilograms of cotton wool. Who has the heavier load? Answer: A load of the same weight.

■ What is the product of all numbers? Answer: Zero.

■ How to turn a sports pole into a number? Answer: Six + b = = six.

■ Remember the popular children's tale about the turnip, which, although with great difficulty, was pulled out. How many eyes saw this vegetable? Answer: 12 eyes.

■ What two numbers, when multiplied, give the same amount as when they are added together? Answer: 2x2= 4, 2 + 2=4.

■ Is it possible to say: “Most of the winter was frosty?” Answer: No, the halves are always the same.

■ There is a queue in the store. The same person was fifth from the end and third from the beginning. How many people are in the queue? Answer: Seven people.

■ When do we look at the number 1 and say "five"? Answer: When we look at the clock and say "five minutes".

■ At the birthday party, the chocolate roll was cut into ten pieces. How many incisions did it take to make it? Answer: Nine cuts.

■ Two people played chess for 2 hours. How long did each play in total? Answer: 2 hours.

■ Hard boil an egg for four minutes. If you throw five eggs into boiling water at eight o'clock, when can you turn off the gas stove? Answer: At 8 hours 4 minutes.

■ A trio of horses rode for 6 hours. How many hours did one horse ride? Answer: 6 hours.

■ Masha has several dogs. After walking in inclement weather, she washed 12 paws. How many dogs does Masha have? Answer: Three dogs.

■ If a highway is longer than an alley, which one is shorter? Answer: Alley.

■ There are many more apples on the plate than oranges and slightly less than pears. What fruits are the least and most? Answer: More apples, fewer oranges.

■ Nif-Nif is older than Naf-Naf, and Naf-Naf is Nuf-Nuf. Who is the youngest? Answer: Nuf-Nuf.

■ If you collect three leaves from oak, maple, ash and aspen, how many leaves will be in the autumn bouquet? Answer: 12 leaves.

■ There were exactly five apples in the basket and in the bag. Two oranges were transferred from the basket to the bag. How many fewer pears are in the basket? Answer: There is no solution to the problem.

■ The cake was cut into four equal pieces, and then each piece was cut into two equal pieces. For how many people will there be enough cake if everyone puts one piece on a saucer? Answer: For 8 people.

■ My sister and brother each received five cakes. The sister ate three and the brother four delicious treats. Who has more cakes left? Answer: Sister.

■ After figure skating, the athletes undressed and left ten skates in the locker room. How many skaters trained at the rink? Answer: 5 people.

■ In the morning the air temperature was minus 9 °C, and then warmed up by seven degrees, did the air temperature become positive by noon? Answer: No.

■ Do you believe that if any number between 10 and 99 is written three times in a row, the result will be divisible by 7 without a remainder? Answer: Yes, for example, 323232: 7 = 46176.

The 20th century began badly for the Celestial Empire. Isolationism led to a backwardness in industry, the impoverishment of the population, and a failure in science and technology. Applied problems were added to social, cultural and financial problems: technologies from countries with alphabetic writing had to be adapted to the most complex Chinese language.

Thousands and thousands of characters

Chinese writing is a hieroglyphic writing system, where each sign corresponds not only to a sound, but also to a morpheme, word or concept. And the hieroglyph itself is a combination of several simpler ones.
For example, the hieroglyph "kindness" consists of the hieroglyphs "speech" and "ram" (don't laugh, in China it personifies innocence, kindness, well-being).

The peculiarity is that the original meaning can change or be lost, and for a word without a graphic correspondence, a new sign is created. As a result, over five thousand years there were a lot of them: the encyclopedia Zhonghua Zihai, published in 1994, contains 85,568 characters.

Naturally, by the 19th century most of them had fallen out of use and became the property of history, but "only" 10-15 thousand of the remaining ones created difficulties that did not exist in countries with alphabetical writing. In the 20s of the last century, a real war broke out around Chinese writing: accessible educational programs were required, but it was not possible to come to a single set of hieroglyphs. From the side of the Communist Party, a young and promising activist, Mao Zedong, dealt with this responsible issue.
There was also hard work on new and convenient principles of classification and cataloging, since the Kangxi key system created in the 18th century (in which hieroglyphs were distributed according to the number of features of the main part - the key) was hopelessly outdated.

Relic in the world of alphabets

In 1871, the world telegraph network reached the Celestial Empire: the first lines connected Shanghai with Hong Kong and Nagasaki. The capacity of the Morse code was not enough, and foreign experts created additional code books for 10,000 entries: 6,800 for common hieroglyphs, and the remaining 3,000 were left for their own abbreviations between operators.

Such "end-to-end encryption" greatly complicated the work: searching through a huge tome took a lot of time, the telegrams came out longer. In addition, messages in Chinese were considered encrypted, so the payment was at more expensive rates.

Another serious problem was the poor distribution of books and newspapers. The typewriter made it possible to create texts quickly and conveniently, it was easier to replicate them. In addition, it became for its time a symbol of progress and globalization: there were modifications for different European alphabets, Hebrew, Arabic.

Since China was too tough for European and American engineers, leading manufacturers announced the impossibility of creating a typewriter for hieroglyphic writing. The device has become the subject of jokes and cartoons, and the expression "Chinese typewriter" has become synonymous with absurd, complex and backward technology.

Because of all these difficulties, the opinion has arisen that Chinese writing is a historical misunderstanding that is long overdue to be replaced. Not everyone supported this idea, and in the first place, the Children of the Dragon themselves did not agree with it.

In 1888, the first typewriter to work with Chinese characters was made by the Christian preacher Devello Sheffield. He did not attach economic importance to his invention, as he created it for personal correspondence. It speeded up the work and eliminated the intermediate link of local secretaries, who sometimes deliberately sabotaged the work and distorted the meaning of the letter.

Sheffield conducted a frequency analysis and came to the conclusion that 4 to 6 thousand characters are needed to work. As a result, he took 4662 hieroglyphs and arranged them on a disk divided into 30 concentric circles and 4 sectors. In the first three characters were divided according to the frequency of their use: 726, 1386, 2550, and in the last sector 162 characters needed in missionary work were duplicated.

The Sheffield typewriter was discussed in the American media, in 1899 Scientific American wrote about it, but it remained in a single copy and was quickly forgotten about.

First prototypes

In 1909, in the United States, on the contribution received after the Boxer Rebellion, they launched an educational program for Chinese students - Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. One of the students was Jou Hokun. He approached the problem of modernizing the Chinese language from a technical point of view and decided to create a Chinese typewriter at all costs.

The prototype was created by May 1914, 3000 letters in it were located on a cylinder 40 cm long and 15 cm in diameter, and a search card was printed on the board in front of the cylinder in accordance with the Kangxi key system. The operator found the desired character on it, placed a metal pointer over it, which set the cylinder in position for printing.

At the same time, another Chinese student, Ki Fuan, was developing his typewriter. His device had only three mechanisms: return, space, and the enter key. To type, the operator manually rotated the cylinder, found a character, and pressed the enter key.

The key difference from Joe's invention was that he added 1327 radicals to 4200 hieroglyphs, from which any compound character could be typed:

Thus, two directions of development were identified in Chinese typewriting: the printing of a character in its entirety and separate printing with the help of radicals.

First production model

In 1916, Zhou returned to China, successfully presented his invention and entered into an agreement with the Shanghai company Commercial Press. But production is still delayed, since Joe's typewriter had a serious drawback: 3000 characters are too few for full-fledged activity, and the cylindrical matrix did not allow increasing their number.

Things were even worse for Ki Fuan: in 1915, at his first presentation to journalists and the Consul General of China, he printed a short note of 100 characters in ... 2 hours. Also, due to the fact that he worked and promoted his invention in the USA, it turned out to be almost unknown in China. In 1918, the Commercial Press broke off relations with Zhou, and another engineer, Shu Changgun, took over the development of the Chinese typewriter. In 1919 he receives a patent.
An important change was the tray that replaced the cylinder: the letters were not fixed in it, which made it possible to change their places, create their own sets. In addition to 2500 hieroglyphs, the set included 5700 interchangeable letters, which were located in the bottom drawer. The tray was divided into three zones: a central zone for the most common, and two side zones for rare hieroglyphs.

Japanese variant

In Japanese, three writing systems are used simultaneously: hieroglyphs of Chinese origin - kanji, and two syllabic alphabets (kana) - hiragana and katakana. The first typewriter for hiragana was patented in 1894, and for katakana in 1901. Kans allowed Western manufacturers to enter the Japanese market, and the fate of kanji was in question. The rejection of it was seen as a symbolic break with the technological and cultural lagging behind Western countries.

Just as in China, not everyone agreed with the abandonment of their own language. In 1916, Kyota Sugimoto (No. 6 of the 10 greatest inventors of Japan) patented his version of a kanji typewriter, and their serial production began in the 1920s.

Japanese companies entered the Korean and Chinese markets, and the issue of competition from local manufacturers was resolved in a samurai way: in 1932, Imperial Army planes bombed the industrial areas of Shanghai, including the Commercial Press building. With the help of such a spectacular marketing ploy, Japanese manufacturers began to dominate the continental market.

After the defeat of Japan in World War II, mass production of copies of Japanese typewriters began in China, and in 1964 mass production of "two doves" began - the title model, which became the main typewriter in communist China.

Impossible Keyboard

Despite its cultural and economic importance, the Chinese typewriter was inferior to its alphabetic counterparts: it was cumbersome and one had to remember the location of all the characters. The scientist, philosopher and outstanding Chinese writer, Lin Yutang, was able to solve this problem.

Unfortunately, MingKwai appeared at the wrong time and turned out to be of no use to anyone: having started working in the early 30s, Lin created a prototype and received a patent only in 1947. It aroused interest from IBM and Remington, but the Chinese Civil War, the victory of the Communists, and then the Korean War completely discouraged Western companies from entering the Chinese market.

hello world!

Despite the fact that MingKwai was forgotten, Lin Yutang's work was in demand after his death: entering a character in parts and outputting suitable values ​​became the basis of the IME for entering Chinese characters, and the classification of characters and distribution of keys developed by him were used in the first Anglo-Chinese keyboards for PC, leaving multi-key monsters in history:

And at the beginning of the 21st century, scientific works appeared devoted to the fact that hieroglyphic writing develops the left hemisphere, and the perception of one character as a combination of several components is more efficient than in alphabetical writing. Well, actually, who would doubt that writing, which has been developing for five thousand years, can be ineffective.

The name of one of the most famous works by Sergei Dovlatov "Solo on Underwood" reminds us of such a cult device as a typewriter. This tool, which we are accustomed to associate with writing and journalistic creativity, seems to be hopelessly outdated - but that is why it has retained all the charm of antiquity, and its fans have not diminished. Our review is about the most unusual typewriters of all time.

1. Writing ball.

And we will start with one of the earliest and most charming examples of a typewriter - "Hansen's printing ball". It was designed in 1865 by the Danish scientist and inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen. The bizarre shape of this device is very different from the modern typewriter, but that's the beauty of it. Resembling a mechanical hedgehog, the Printed Ball, gleaming with brass and oiled gears, has become one of the aesthetic prototypes of the modern steampunk style.

2. Machine-grasshopper.

The Williams typewriter, put into production in 1891, is already more like we are used to. In spirit and style, this thing is more in line with factory and factory production of the late 19th century than with a romantic individualized steampunk. She owes her nickname "grasshopper" to the amusingly twitching "legs" - levers from the keys.

3. The father of modern cars.

This review would be incomplete without the most famous representative of the classic typewriters of the turn of the century before last and the last - the Underwood device. If it were not for him, then "Solo on Underwood" would not have been played - one would have to be content with some overwhelmed Remington.

4. Typewriters of the XX century.

Unfortunately, the era of type design and mass production left almost no interesting milestones on the winding path of typewriters. They are firmly linked in the minds of our compatriots with dusty offices, silent officials and boring routine. The indignation depicted on the face of this device vividly depicts the sad fate of typewriters in the era of industrial enslavement.

5. Japanese typewriter.

In the meantime, nothing interesting happens to our multi-key friends in Europe, let's ask ourselves the age-old Russian question: what does a keyboard with hieroglyphs look like? The best examples of Japanese typewriters give us the answer. A bank of hieroglyphs lies on the ink pad, and the operator places a foot to snatch the keys over the desired hieroglyph. The presser foot grabs the impression and applies it to the paper. Anyone who sees this incredibly complex process will never say that hieroglyphic writing helped Japan and China enter the post-industrial era.

6. Green joy.

However, not everything was so hopeless in the West. The Hermes typewriter, first introduced in 1958, was one of the most innovative of its time. Its success was facilitated not only by an increase in the quality of printing, but also by a nice "green" design - it's funny that no one had even heard of ecology at that time.

7. Typewriter-laptop.

But time gradually passed, and serious competitors appeared for typewriters - computers and laptops. It is not for nothing that Dovlatov's later, emigrant story is already called "Solo on IBM". The most advanced typewriters have intermarried with the invaders, sometimes resulting in offspring with interesting design and functionality, like this one. Valentine.

8. Hybrid car.

The golden age - or, more precisely, the golden autumn - of typewriters began when they ceased to be an object of necessity and lost their pretensions to functionality. This is where design experiments began, one of which was an attempt to cross an old keyboard with a modern screen using Jack Zylkin's imagination and a USB connection.

9. Calculator machine.

Another attempt to breathe old content into a new form is this "". In accordance with the slightly bantering idea of ​​its creators, this tool is left to the mercy of only the functions of the calculator - but it looks ultramodern.

10. Return to antiquity.

And the smartest designers realized that it makes no sense to catch the past by the tail, and that with the current technology, a typewriter is a low-functional, but vintage device that emphasizes the owner’s creative orientation, his tastes and commitment to the charming style of antiquity. That is why our "Underwood solo" is summed up by this advanced typewriter, which at the same time resembles a Singer sewing machine.

Writing computers are relatively recent, but attempts to invent mechanical writing devices began nearly three centuries ago. In 1714, Britain's Queen Anne authorized a patent to an engineer named Henry Mill certifying that he had invented "an artificial machine or method of drawing letters, one by one, or successively one after another, as in hand writing." Unfortunately, this turned out to be easier in theory than in practice. Mill failed to build a working typewriter; a similar fate befell dozens of other inventors who tried to put the same idea into practice. This could not be done until the 60s of the last XIX century, when a newspaper editor and publisher from pcs. Wisconsin (USA) Christopher L. Sholes finally solved the problem.

There was something in the character of Sholes that brought him closer to a modern hacker. After receiving a public position as chief of customs for the Port of Milwaukee, he left the newspaper business, but often recalled the long hours spent writing and rewriting articles, when his only tool of labor was a quill pen or a steel-tipped pen. There must be a better way, and Sholes was determined to find it. Since the new job did not require much effort - Milwaukee was not a major international port - Sholes found enough time for his favorite pastime - technical invention. Working in a local workshop, Sholes and his companion Carlos Glidden came up with an apparatus for sequential numbering of book pages. From this simple device the typewriter originated.

Sholes patented his device in 1867. Six years later, Sholes and Glidden's typewriter began to be manufactured by Remington and Sons (Remington and Sans), a solid arms company, which later turned into Remington Rand (Remington Rand) and in 1951 began to produce and sell Univac UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the US. After the American Civil War (1861-1865), Remington, expanding its range of products, began to produce sewing machines in addition to weapons. This was reflected in the models of typewriters: they were decorated with cheerful floral patterns and began to be mounted on the bed of a sewing machine in such a way that pressing the pedal caused a carriage return.

The first typewriter, created in 1873 by Sholes and Glidden, was attractive enough in appearance, but not very comfortable to use. With a typewriter of this design, hammers with letters hit the roller from below, and the typist could not see the typed text.

The first typewriter model had serious flaws. The typewriter was quite expensive at that time, $125, and it was possible to print on it only in capital letters. Also, since the characters driven by the keys were hidden under the carriage, the carriage had to be raised to see the printed text.

Success for the typewriter did not come immediately, but some of the first buyers rated it very highly. Among them is the former typographical compositor Samuel Clemens, who wrote books under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. Striking the keys with one finger (the blind typing system was invented a few years later), Twain typed out a letter to his brother:

"I'm trying to get used to this newfangled typewriter, but so far, it seems without much success. However, this is my first attempt, and I still think that I will soon and easily learn how to use it ... I believe that it will type faster than me I can write. She fits a lot of words on one page. She writes clearly, does not smear or plant ink blots."
Mark Twain

Chinese typewriter?

Did the Chinese have something similar to a European typewriter?
After all, there are thousands of characters in Chinese. Before the invention of the computer, all documentation was drawn up manually, with the help of clerks, connoisseurs of hieroglyphs?

Artificial intelligence August 01, 2010 (rev. 1.08.2010 20:30) replied: 90 50
Chinese typewriter MingKwai, 1946:

Hieroglyphs were typed with a combination of keys according to the Lin system. The machine could create 8,000 different characters, and with the help of their combinations, it could print 90,000 words.
Shuangge typewriter

It allowed typing 30,000 hieroglyphs, but at the same time - only 3,000 - so many hieroglyphs fit in the tray of the machine, the rest were stored separately. The operator placed the "scanner" over the desired character, the hammer grabbed the bar with the character and hit it on the paper.

And here is the Japanese Nippon SH-280, 1929:

I printed 2400 hieroglyphs. The operator moved the mechanical system over the desired hieroglyph and, by pressing the handle, actuated the “foot”, which grabbed the bar with the hieroglyph and printed it on a sheet of paper.

The complexity of classical Chinese writing is illustrated by the structure of the Chinese typewriter.
The drum (tray) contains more than 2000 symbols, with several thousand more available in other drums (there is information that there are about 5700 symbols in total). The typist first aligns the drum, then presses the key, which collects the required character and makes an impression on the paper opposite. The machine can print vertically and horizontally.
This happens slowly - good typists average at most 20 characters per minute.

SOURCE: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, (Cambridge: Cmabridge University Press, 1987), p. 31
The next picture is an "improved", "cool" Chinese typewriter, the latest model of '47. :) In it, each hieroglyph is printed component by component - the upper, middle and lower parts. There are much fewer buttons, but it has a very complex mechanism and difficult controls.

The width of the keyboard is about one meter, on which prints with hieroglyphs (letters) that were previously in the box are placed. Naturally, the most popular words used in print are located on the canvas. Such as "Mao", "Peace", "Labor", "May" are located closer to the center. Accordingly, the closer to the edge of the canvas, the less popular the hieroglyph. Disused waiting in the box. Before printing a hieroglyph, the operator needs to find it with a magnifying glass. And only then, fixing it on the holder, transfer the image to paper. The fastest and most professional typists achieve typing speeds of only 11 words per minute.

To use a typewriter, the paper must be wrapped around a cylindrical rubber roller that moves on rollers over a bed of type. The operator uses a level to control the an arm, which picks up the pieces of the metal symbol from the stock, makes an impression on paper, and returns them to their niches.

So - if you:
- you can't force yourself to work;
- if everything around you annoys;
- if you think only about how to get home early;
- even if you're just in a bad mood - JUST THINK ABOUT A CHINESE TYPIST!!!