All bureaucracies produce mountains of paperwork, and Mao Zedong’s sprawling authoritarian regime in China was certainly no exception. To process it all, the country needed a very special typewriter: the Double Pigeon. Under Mao, the Double Pigeon, known for its signature pale green color, was the preferred model among ordinary Chinese functionaries, Communist Party cadres, universities, banks, and police stations. But look closely and you’ll see that the Double Pigeon was no Remington knockoff. For starters, it lacked a keyboard. Instead, the machine relied on a rectangular bed containing 2,450 metal cubes (“slugs,” in typesetters’ lingo) — one for each of the most commonly used Chinese characters.
OMG I cannot imagine trying to type anything at a speed of 20 characters a minute! I would go out of my head!
When I teach my Japanese socioling I have a unit about the advent of Japanese word processing and how delayed it was compared to alphabet-based languages, and then we talk about how that impacted the way workplaces evolved in 1980s early 1990s.
But that is all much more recent history. I should add this article as a supplement, thanks WTG!
