A woman found a mysterious typewriter in her dad’s belongings. It turned out to be priceless.

Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson didn’t know what to make of the strange machine they found among her late father’s belongings. Pulled from an Arizona storage unit, it weighed about 50 pounds and had the general shape of an old typewriter. But one look at the keyboard made it clear this was something different. “This isn’t just a typewriter. These are not English symbols,” Jennifer recalled to Stanford Magazine. Nelson decided to see if the internet could help solve the mystery. After posting a few photos to a Facebook group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” the couple went out to dinner. When they checked Facebook again, people worldwide were trying to reach them. Some wanted to buy the machine, while others were begging them not to sell it. The sudden interest made sense once Jennifer and Nelson realized learned what they had. The machine was the MingKwai, an experimental Chinese typewriter built by author and linguist Lin Yutang in the 1940s. Once considered lost, the prototype was the only MingKwai ever created. Now it was sitting among Jennifer’s father’s belongings. Front view of the MingKwai typewriter. Photo credit: Nelson F./Wikimedia Commons How do you fit thousands of characters on a typewriter? The conventional English typewriter has a relatively straightforward design. With only 26 letters in the alphabet, each letter has its own key. Press a key, and that letter prints on the page. That doesn’t work well for written Chinese. The language uses thousands of characters, far too many to assign each one a key on a normal-sized keyboard. But these characters aren’t all completely different from one another. Many are built from smaller components and shapes that appear again and again. Lin’s machine didn’t need a key for every finished character if he could use those shared pieces to form them. The MingKwai, completed in 1947, had just 72 keys. Instead of using a separate key for every character, a typist pressed keys corresponding to different parts of the character they wanted to type. Those keystrokes helped the machine search through thousands of characters, only displaying up to eight possible matches in a small window. Lin called it the “Magic Eye.” The typist looked through the window, chose the right character using a numbered key, and only then did the MingKwai print it on the page. Lin Yutang, author and inventor of MingKwai typewriter. Photo credit: Carl Van Bechten/Wikimedia Commons The “Magic Eye” typewriter moves toward production The MingKwai attracted plenty of attention when Lin unveiled it in 1947, including coverage in The New York Times. It also drew commercial interest, but financial problems and political turmoil complicated efforts to bring it to market, according to China Books Review. Lin and his daughter demonstrated the typewriter for executives at Remington, a typewriter manufacturer in New York. During the demonstration, the MingKwai malfunctioned. Adding to that setback, the Chinese Communist Revolution created uncertainty about whether the patents would be honored. There was also talk that China might move away from traditional Chinese characters and adopt a writing system based on the Roman alphabet, potentially making Lin’s invention unnecessary. Then the Korean War put the United States and China on opposite sides of a conflict, adding further political unrest. With the MingKwai’s path to production growing increasingly complicated, mass production never took place. Lin eventually sold the prototype and its commercial rights to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn. And that’s where the story connects back to Jennifer’s family. Her grandfather worked as a machinist for Mergenthaler. Jennifer is unsure how the machine ended up in his possession. He kept it in a handmade wooden crate before Jennifer’s father inherited it and brought it from New York to Arizona. MingKwai typewriter as it appears in a United States patent. Photo credit: Campbell, Brumbaugh & Free/Wikimedia Commons The MingKwai failed, but the original idea didn’t Only one MingKwai ever came to life, but the problem Yutang set out to solve didn’t go away. In the 1950s, engineers at MIT working on an early Chinese-language computer had to figure out how someone could use a keyboard with a few dozen keys to type thousands of characters. Their solution followed a similar principle. As the Computer History Museum explains, typing Chinese became a search process. Someone typing Chinese on a computer or a phone today enters information, the device offers possible characters, and the user chooses the character they want. The mechanical gears and “Magic Eye” may be gone, but the basic idea behind Yutang’s machine has become a familiar part of typing Chinese on a modern device. The original MingKwai is now at Stanford, but researchers don’t want to risk operating or taking apart the only one ever made. After putting it through a medical CT scanner to see how the complicated machinery works inside, researchers are using what they learned to build a working replica. It would be just the second MingKwai ever made.