Jamie Fisher: The Pursuit of a Chinese Typewriter

The problem was Qwerty, not China, where moveable type predated Gutenberg by several centuries. But the typewriter was developed for the West by the West, during a period in which China was decidedly closed off, and by the time typewriters had become a common feature of commercial life, their form was relatively fixed. At the turn of the 20th century, the missionary inventors trying for a Siamese typewriter simply lopped off two letters of the Siamese alphabet, like Cinderella’s stepsisters severing the offending toe to make the foot fit the slipper.

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ozCP2S