Solving China's Hardest Engineering Problem
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Notes:
Why I am learning Chinese 👉 • Why I am Learning Chin...
Traybed Typewriter video 👉 • Crazy Chinese Typewriter
We made a Chinese Typewriter video 👉 • 【何同学】我们做了一个中文打字机...
Their Bilibili channel 👉space.bilibili.com/163637592
The Chinese typewriter a history 👉 amzn.to/3CNjKzJ
The Antique store where I bought the typewriter: www.serendipityantiquesathens...
Is Hangul an Alphabet? 👉link.springer.com/chapter/10.....
Technical corrections
Nothing yet
I now understand why it’s called the “SHIFT” key.
I thought the same thing! I also appreciate that someone tried to carry over the literal "uppercase" and "lowercase" letters before they figured it out.
I really suggest watching the video on this from @TechnologyConnections
I thought the same!
🤯
You didn’t know that? You young kids.
as a Chinese speaker, your Chinese is actually quite good for a beginner, a lot of people have to use English substitutes for a lot of phrases even after years of learning, and you did not have any substitutions, which is impressive. Pronunciations of each words are quite clear, although not how we would say them because we use them too quickly that some sounds mashes into each other, but I appreciate the effort on each character. Good luck with learning one of the most difficult language.
Thank you for the feedback. You are so right. Listening to natives the words almost blend together. I have tried to copy this actually but I start to mess up the tones. My brain wants to make it musical going up after going down etc instead of using the right tone. I think once I have more mastery I can say it with more confidence and speed.
Well? What did he say at the end?
@@JeremyFieldingSr My wife (native of Beijing) is a Mandarin teacher. I mentioned this to her a while back and her observation was that native speakers often do use the wrong tone, but the context is used to deduce meaning. And somehow she can’t get the hang of context in English!🤪
is there the same problem with Chinese keyboards?
@@ethanmac639 he answered that in the video.. they use software and type a romanized phoneme to and pick a word/character
As a big Technology Connections fan, this one hits the spot.
Indeed!
I like the older ones, before he got all political and jugdy.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 I thought Technology Connections was always political and jugdy.
@@esra_erimez Maybe... but I remember him explaining technology as opposed to crying about how stupid turn signals and extension cords are. Like we get it, your hindsight is way smarter than 100 years of evolving standards. lol
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 I mean there are like 3 videos about that lol. He's always been snarky about stuff and particular about things he cares about.
I saw similar things with Japanese typewriters in the 1980's but even those took advantage of modern-ish electronics. With katakana, romanji, and kanji it really became practical with computers. This is absolutely fascinating and something I've often wondered about.
Fax was adopted early in Japan and continued longer because of the thousands of Chinese characters. I recall USD 10,000 for a fax machine was considered acceptable. Kudos on learning Mandarin!
FYI the character sets used in Japanese are hiragana, katakana and kanji. Romaji is the Japanese word for the roman alphabet. Japanese can be written in romaji but it's awkward to put it mildly.
@@jon9103 100% correct. It has been more than 30 years for me... LOL I need to brush up my Engrish. :)
It's really satisfying when you can somewhat understand and communicate with other people in their native tongue. Back in the 80s I learned German and Russian, when I was in the service. It was a definite blessing in my life.
I've been learning japanese for about 4 years now and I went into a similar rabbit hole during the initial stage regarding how I was going to type kanji, it was good to get a small flashback to that time.
I'm disappointed you didn't start your test of the antique typewriter with: "Hello World".
It would have been fun, but I guess he’s not a programmer so it makes sense.
That would have hit the spot
Ok, that would have been funny LOL
or "G28" and wonder why it didn't move@@JeremyFieldingSr
Unbelievable skills. Thank you so much Jeremy for taking the time to make these videos. I have been subscribed to your channel for a very long time. All my respect.
That was a lot of fun. Your Kiwico ads are often my favorite part of your videos. Your whole family is beautiful. Thanks for another great video.
WOW! I always was curious about that too. Thank you for the presentation. Great work.
Great topic. I love the opening, “I decided to learn Chinese”. Like a married man with four children doesn’t have enough to do. You’re amazing.
You have a nice team to help you with the projects at home. Good job.
I've always wondered about this, and you explained it so well. Great video!
Very interesting video, thank you. I'd read such devices existed, but didn't realize how they worked or how complex they were. You explained it. And I'm impressed by your language skills.
Dude..... Been a while so figured I would stop by to check your channel out. So glad to see you going off in totally random and interesting directions. Anything you find interesting..... We're here for it.👍
This guy is the best. He asks the questions people look at me like I'm a weirdo for asking. But I'm just curious and love to learn. VERY much appreciate your videos. Keep them coming!! 😄
I am really happy that the KZhead algorithm suggested this video. This comment is mainly to feed it more. Great video about a very interesting topic. I really like your causal, friendly narration. Best wishes, Erik.
Huge fan; watching this video from Shanghai right now and this is so interesting. Thank you Jeremy.
Epic research, awesome presentation, world class content. Thank you for sharing.
You seem like a great guy/father. nice family and great engineer. wish you the success you rightfully deserve
Love this video and it is really cool to see the challenges and solutions when making chinese typewriters, but I really want to point out how I'm really impressed with your Chinese speaking ability as an American Taiwanese!
very fun and informative video aside, your relationship with the kids is so wholesome, if i ever become a father i hope i can provide my kids this much love and education
Just love watching your channel. You’re awesome 👏 Thank you for sharing everything. Blessings, Carlos ✝️🙏❤️😊🇺🇸
Yes, I have heard of the 4-digit code typesetter. Afaik they were used until the early 1990s to typeset newsprint.
Love your work, mate!
Your Chinese is quite good for not living in a Chinese speaking environment. I’ve lived in Shanghai for a very long time. The more one is surrounded and immersed the faster is your progress. The less one worried about making mistakes and just use the language the faster is one’s progress. My experience is that if you say something incorrectly, there may be a bit of giggling, but you will be coached and corrected. My Chinese friends are very supportive of foreigners learning Chinese. They realize how difficult the language is to learn and always are very encouraging. I’m going to go and watch the Chinese video now. 加油！ 继续学习中文！欢迎来上海！欢迎来我工厂。四台加工中心。来的话有机会提高你的机加工专用词汇量。😊
Bummed that this is the first time I recall hearing about the second channel. Thanks for the awesome deep dive
Awesome job, sir! Learning a tonal language is a real brain stretcher for those of us who started with a scratch mongrel (said with affection) like English. And the technology is pretty cool, too. I look forward to what you do with this in the future, because I'm sure this is going to be awesome.
Really enjoyed this Jeremy, thank you.
This was awesome on so many levels!!
I'm not Chinese, but your pronunciation sounded really authentic! I once had the privilege to see (behind glass) one of those typewriters that can do the entire Chinese character set. It was in a German museum, either in Berlin or in München. The mind-blowing thing was that it took humanity thousands of years to get to this technical achievement... and then the next year the first PC entered the market, making it sort of obsolete (even though printing technology wasn't super advanced yet, dot matrix printers basically made it possible to print whatever one wants, given the right software of course.
I had no idea about the "problem" and im beyond impressed with the solution. Thank you for the video and the free knowledge.
This is such an interesting piece of engineering history. Thanks for sharing this story with the details!
That was a very informative and interesting video. Thanks!
I enjoyed the video. I especially appreciated how your face lit up as you said your wife is beautiful in Chinese.
Great video, Jeremy!
You inspire me alot. keep up the great work brother. I'm definetely going to learn Swedish/French now.
That’s fascinating. Learning a new language is very useful.
Fascinating! As a Chinese (living in the US) I never knew there were Chinese typewriters, let alone the level of engineering that went into them. Thank you for taking the time to make a video on this topic. 如果你住在旧金山附近我非常高兴帮助你练习口语。
Great video!
That was so enjoyable to watch, thank you 🙂
Wow man great job!!!
Awesome Video as always!
Great Video! subbed and liked
Beautiful video Jeremy, thank you. Love the Engineering analysis on such a beautifully human topic 😊
i just want to say i was only looking for a clip of the chinese tray typewriter machine, and recognised you from tom scott's lateral wonderful video, instant subscribe, and i wish you great luck in your mandarin-learning journey!!
Interesting video!
Omg I'm learning Chinese for about one year too so cool keep it up you're doing phenomenal 🎉
Hello Jeremy! Great video, so entertaining. Maybe you know the work of Shaolan "Chineasy". Beautiful explanation of the symbol background of the words. (Pub. Thames and Hudson: "chineasy". I enjoyed it a lot. Keep up the great videos.
This thought had never occurred to me before. Immediately when I read the title, the problems became apparent. Though after watching, I wasn't quite aware of exactly how complex it those problems truly are. Whats interesting still is how these problems may have cascaded throughout the development of cultures purely based upon language structures.
i remember my brother coming home for xmas break from yale where he was learning chinese in 1962. he brought 5,000 flash cards to memorize. i thought he was nuts.
You are a good father, among other skills Jeremy.
Thank you, you reminded me of how i was practicing tagalog, like your videos thank you.
Great video that answers a great question!
Very interesting video! I also just started mandarin!
thanks Jeremy . . . always love ya work
Bravo! well done! I always wondered how Chinese typing was done. Even with computers, although the computer has no problem handling thousands of different characters, the input problem is still insurmountable without the aid of either phonetics with alphabets or voice recognition. It is interesting to see the ingenuity for addressing such a seemingly insurmountable problem
This is all just such a great video, topic, concept just all around brilliant. I've been trying to learn Chinese for about 2 years, slow progress and only app based so far but about to actually start learning properly. I just managed to understand your secret message. Took me about 3 hours to watch this video with the amount of Chinese learning and typewriter rabbit holes I went down. Keep it up Jeremy!
Thanks!
This is a really cool video, and it's an interesting problem. I remember as a teenager around the time of Microsoft Word being a relatively new thing, being curious about Chinese characters - specifically around the usage of fonts, and whether they were capable of being represented in as many different ways as English fonts, which can sometimes be quite varied from a "standard" representation - even basic things like serif vs sans serif, italics, comic book style vs more professional style etc. If you look at the English-speaking graffiti scene, some of those pieces have large bubble fonts etc that even English speakers struggle to read sometimes - is there a Chinese graffiti scene with similar styles? I still don't understand Chinese, so it's all still a mystery to me. If you wanted to do a follow up video to address this, or even a short reply, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Also, your attempt to speak Chinese at the end sounded "authentic" to me as someone who can't understand it. You did very well, I'm sure - a lot better than I can do. Even the effort to learn is commendable. Thanks for the video!
We had that same Royal when I was a kid. Remarkable piece of machinery.
Another fantastic video! Really interesting and entertaining!
Nice work
You are an amazing man Jeremy, I aspire to be more like you..
that was amazing!
thank you so much
Wow. Your mandarin pronunciation is actually extremely good
Very impressive speaking at the end
Jeremy . . . You are amazing in so many ways.
Jeremy, wow kudos to you for learning Chinese at your age. Fantastic. I love your videos, you are so personable, wonderful to see you are spending time helping your children to expand their engineering knowledge even if they don’t use it in their adults lives, they will cherish the memories you are making with them.
很有趣的影片，還有我知道你在說甚麼! 在看這個影片之前沒想過做中文打字機會遇到這些的挑戰，非常謝謝你介紹這個主題，也歡迎一起來語言交換 😀
谢谢你！你的视频很有意思！恭喜恭喜学中文。I also had no reason to study Mandarin Chinese other than it looks really cool, but it is definitely worth it.
Interesting , Thank You
What a brilliant way to solve the problem, I was thinking of those ball-type typewriters (don’t remember what they’re called) when you were talking about the problem, I wonder if they were inspired by this?
I’m in my 50s, and it’s videos like this that make me feel my age… So much of what you discussed about regular typewriters is just stuff I learned just living life as a kid.
As a big Technology Connections fan, this one hits the spot.. I now understand why it’s called the “SHIFT” key..
I think most of Indian languages (which are agglutinative languages) had the same problem, where the shape of the letter changes as consonant and vowel merge and when not merged (Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not attached to a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant). Type writers mostly fixed it using the same method mentioned here, though the first one was a modified English typewriter from Halda (by Anatha Subbaraya from Shivamogga in old Mysore state).
Wow, that's an incredible piece of mechanical design! As to IBM's version, while it's probably not ideal for writing, you'd be surprised to find how easy it might be to remember several thousand code numbers like that. It's not that far removed from just knowing all the Chinese characters in the first place, given a number doesn't particularly correspond to a given word any more than its character usually does (in most cases anyway) I know firsthand how quick you can pick this up because I had to do it myself for a job I did about 20 years ago and I was shocked how naturally my brain managed to remember several thousand code numbers very quickly. It was a data entry job, taking the information from prescription forms that pharmacies had dispensed and putting them on a computer so the pharmacy would get paid. There was an individual 3 - 7 digit code for every item in the British Pharmacopeia - so not just a separate code for each drug, but each formulation, modification, pack size, etc of each drug. So sometimes dozens of different codes for any given drug, and there are a lot of drugs! We had a tabletop reference with every code on it, kind of like a huge linear Rolodex, both for initially learning the job, and since you often had to look up uncommon items. There were over 25,000 codes on the thing, but after a few weeks in the job I found I could go hundreds of prescriptions without having to look anything up, since I'd memorised the top couple of thousand codes. I remember one day they for some reason had to change the code for the single most common item (28-pack gastro resistant coated aspirin, 75mg) and the whole office was up in arms! 😂
Not many people have good memory as you! An easier way would be to treat each Chinese character as short words or syllable, and each of these words is made of "letters" that that are made from the simpler Chinese radicals. Chinese characters are made from 214 radicals, or simpler characters, that are the building blocks to make more complex characters. Each of those radicals can be used as a letter for our ANSI keyboard.... that can be typed horizontally using ANSI keyboard for the computer to translate into a complex Chinese character. More complex radicals can be represented by 2 simpler radicals (letters), so we can have 48 Chinese letters to fit into a computer keyboard. With this principle, you can type Chinese characters very fast using existing ANSI keyboard, without using Pinyin. You only have to remember what Chinese letter (or radical) each of the key in the keyboard stands for. Far easier to remember 48 items than 5,000 items!
That's amazing! The human mind is incredible in it's versatility. I think something very strange happened when we forked off from the apes. Thanks for sharing.
I agreed. Your spoken Chinese was very clear and excellent for a beginner. The tones needed work, but overall very good. I suspect if you spend a few months in China or Taiwan, you'd be relatively fluent. Thanks for taking the time to explain one of the first Chinese typewriter.
this was mint mate
Always good when a Westerner learns about the world outside their language bubble. Good on you.
"with english, the letters are all the same size and equally spaced" - this is only true in the context of typewriters and because of the limitations of typewriters. even with old-fashioned printing presses letters were different sizes, and they had tons of ligatures to make printed words more similar to actual written words.
True, but I think that is more a function of the font that is being used. There is no requirement in English that would require anything but monospaced (horizontal/vertical) characters.
Friend restores some.. ribbons are the challenge. He submitted his graduate application with one. get a cheap one.. at worse you have cool sculpture parts. millions of them out there.
Pretty good. Reminds me of mandarin second language Chinese speakers (ya, some of us are old enough to have gone through local dialect first) and that's what it sounds like to me. Probably the speed and effort on intonation gives it away. With well known/tread phrases, you glide more effortlessly through and are indistinguishable.
The predictive text component is EXTRA interesting when you consider that all the big AI innovations of the last couple years, such as ChatGPT, are based almost entirely on predictive text. They just have a very advanced way of analyzing prior text.
I wonder how the cost of typewriter ribbon compares to the cost of inkjet ink (which is something like $10,000.00 per gallon BTW) based on how much text they each can produce.
Ribbon is still cheaper, even the specialty stuff that is professionally refurbished old stock - and thus required a little bit of labor.
You're probably aware that the whole printer ink thing is a giant racket. The ink cartridges actually have chips in them that detect when you start using them and make them artificially "run out" after a certain period of time. Multicolor cartridges will say they are out of ink if any color runs out.. so if you run out of blue, it will refuse to print black, saying its out of ink. They also detect if you tamper with them so you can't refill them yourself. Somehow this does not seem to have happened to toner with laser printers (yet?)
@@adfaklsdjf "Racket" is far too kind. *MASSIVE* widespread, long running *SCAM,* as in _criminal behavior_ seems closer to the truth.
@@adfaklsdjf that does vary a bit by Printer-maker brand, at least, as well as printer model. my HP can have it's cartridges refilled, but they're so unreliable even straight out of the package.....
@@DFX2KX HP has some experience with printers and knows how to make them properly if they want to. My instinct is that your ink cartridge problems are some kind of scam, too, or side-effects of one.
Wow congrats Jeremy, that‘s actually really good! As a Chinese living in Germany, I can definitely resonate with the experience in learning a hard second language. Speaking/writing is in my case as well harder, but sometimes a beer helps. And it’s interesting to see you follow some Chinese content:) Best luck and have fun in the further learning!
This is a marvel of engineering spanning a century. Creating pretty much the first predictive text machine and the first patent for a crucial part of today's global economy and advancements, especially for countries like China who didn't Romanize their languages (yet).
I love lots of your videos and this one was a bit different from than norm and was great
好厉害！This is awesome to see. I'm also learning Chinese and going into Engineering. It's awesome to see you being an engineering ICON and speaking 中文。 我想问，你现在学中文多久？
一年
Hey , Jeremy, I am a printer by profession and my mother was a typist for most of her life. I say that just to say this, typewriters are some of the neatest mechanical devices, right up there with time pieces that use gears and all. The first electric type writers actually slowed down the workers because they could out run the machines ability to process the first letter and move to the next. If you look up guineas book of world records , and it's been a long time ago, but the man who set the record for most words typed correctly on a typewriter was done with a manual because of that out running the machine part. On mechanical each button has its own arm, like a piano. On electric it's kinda like magic in a turning ball of whatever. I love the old old old ways of printing and typewriters are part of it.
at 9:05, My favorite (not) thing about the radicals is that sometimes the same exact shape represents different radicals. I've been learning Hanzi (actually Kanji) for a long time, and I have never been able to really use the idea of radicals effectively. I think the most they can really do is tell you the word "has something to do with...", and even then, the connection is often very tenuous. You can make up a story after you know what the Kanji character means, but predicting precisely what it means just from the radicals used...no.
谢谢， 师傅。 电脑太好了。他们做的中文便利
Your pronunciation is very good for my standard (someone that's learning too and live with native Chinese speakers). I'm a bit jealous of your level... 😅
You are a legend. No doubt. 🙂
Total respect for this. You did far better than I with your Mandarin. Being surrounded by so many good English speakers made me lazy. I can count to ten, say thank you, good morning and tell you I don't understand fluently. You have to put your foot in it. What will make your Mandarin more natural is not the precision (too self conscious and obviously Western) but the blurring, get some Guangdong flavour in there. (Other provinces are available) Good Luck!
To think that (literary figure) Lin Yutang was the one who figured out how to solve the problem -- not only conceptually (that alone would have been very impressive) but even at the level of engineering and patents! That was absolutely fascinating to learn. Thank you!
its just a bit sad it never got produced.. timing and other comercial circumstances have to be right, just solving a problem wont cut it most of the times
Wow, just wow!
There's a fascinating lecture by Tom Mullaney on Chinese typewriter history (on the Letterform Archive channel) that discusses the concept of "hypography" as a different way to think of reproducing writing in different languages.
I'm impressed, good work! Hey how about a typewriter where a stylus pushes down some pins in a matrix?, and those pushed pins strike the ink ribbon on the paper, or convert it to a character for laser printers. Hit Reset to bring all the pins up again for the next word.
Fascinating!!!