In 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself way out in the suburbs of London. A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was going to be renovating her house soon, she told him, and it needed a new home.

2010年，墨磊宁(Tom Mullaney)来到伦敦一处郊区。那里的一位女士想给他看一台中文打字机。她说，家里准备重新装修，这台打字机需要一个新的归宿。

Dr. Mullaney, a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years searching the globe for Chinese typewriters, wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of Chinese characters while remaining small enough to keep on a desk.

身为斯坦福大学中国史教授的墨磊宁多年来在全球搜罗中文打字机。这些奇妙的机器能够打印数千个汉字，同时又小到可以放在桌子上。

The typewriter, 50 pounds of metal frame and levers, was one of a dying breed. If he didn’t save it, would it wind up on a scrapheap?

这台重达23公斤的打字机由金属框架和杠杆组成，这是一种越来越稀少的物品。如果他不出手，恐怕会被当成垃圾扔掉？

It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices that he’d hunted down.

他把这台打字机装进行李箱，带回加州，加入他四处搜罗来的、规模日益庞大的亚洲文字打印设备收藏。

But there was one typewriter that Dr. Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese.

唯有一台打字机让墨磊宁自觉寻获无望，那就是明快打字机。这台机器的发明者是一位住在曼哈顿的特立独行的中国语言学家，他喜欢搞各种小发明。这台打字机的机械结构是现在几乎所有人用于中文打字的系统的前身。

Only one — the prototype — was ever made.

世间仅存一台原型机。

“It was the one machine,” he said recently, “which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.”

“那是唯一一台机器，”他在不久前说道。“尽管我遍寻线索、多方查探，但这台机器绝对是百分之百地彻底消失了。”

斯坦福大学历史教授墨磊宁将中文打字机列为自己的专长领域。

Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.

墨磊宁对这些笨重文字设备的痴迷始于2007年，当时他正在准备一个关于汉字消亡的讲座，结果却陷入对万物消解的思考。

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.

在数量庞大的汉字中——据估计大约有10万个——有数百个字的读音已无人知晓。它们虽然白纸黑字留存在古籍中，但它们的读音，甚至它们的含义，都已失传。

Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.

墨磊宁坐在自己的办公室里，思索着纸上看似永垂不朽的东西竟能遭人遗忘，他陷入了思维的迷宫。

It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?

他想，要造出一台能包含历史上所有手写汉字的打字机，从物理层面来说是不可能的。肯定是有些字被留下了，有些则被舍弃了。他靠在椅背上问自己：在他记忆里，有没有见过中文打字机？

Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.

两小时后，他躺在办公室地板上，查看这类设备的专利文件。在过去一个半世纪里，竟然造出了几十种不同的中文打字机。每一种都是发明者就如何将数千个汉字融入一台机器且使其可用给出的方案——是他们语言理念的具体体现。这些打字机从未大量生产，如今越来越罕见，和大多数过时技术一样消失了。

Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.

墨磊宁被深深吸引了。

That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.

那个夜晚的探索变成了数月的研究，进而发展为数年的搜寻，中文打字机成了他的历史专业领域之一。

He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”

他给陌生人直接打电话，给私人收藏家留言——他根据网上的蛛丝马迹做判断，怀疑这些人有打字机。他仔细查阅Ancestry.com，寻找某台特定机器最后已知所有者的亲属。他给博物馆打电话，问：“你们会不会收藏了一台中文打字机？”

Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.

有时，答案是肯定的。特拉华州的一家私人博物馆恰好有一台幸存的IBM中文打字机，这种机器仅造了两三台。旧金山一家华人基督教堂有人联系他，说他们有一台打字机想处理掉，墨磊宁接手了。

The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters.

在少数了解中文打字机的人当中，明快打字机是传奇般的存在。

It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically — perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers.

它的发明者是林语堂，一位中国语言学家和公共知识分子。20世纪30年代，他开始担心，如果无法将毛笔字转化为易于复制的文本，中国会在技术上落后——甚至可能被外国势力摧毁。

和大多数过时技术一样，中文打字机已经日益稀少。

Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine.

制造中文打字机的尝试通常都卡在一个问题上：如何把海量汉字塞进一台机器里。

Dr. Lin’s solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened.

林语堂的解决方案是一套巧妙的系统，装在一个看似大型西方打字机的设备里。但当你敲击键盘时，奇妙的事情发生了。

Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Dr. Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.

任意两个按键，都代表汉字的组成部分，会带动机器内部的齿轮。在林语堂称为“魔眼”的中央窗口里，会出现多达八个包含这些组成部分的汉字，打字员可以选出正确的那个。

Dr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Dr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.

林语堂让用72个键打出数万个汉字成为可能。墨磊宁说，这简直就像林语堂发明了用一个单键就能打出整个罗马字母表的键盘。

He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”

林语堂给这台机器命名为“明快”，大致意思是“明确、快速”。

Dr. Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer.

当时林语堂和妻儿住在曼哈顿上东区，他高薪聘请纽约一家机械公司制造原型机，花了一大笔钱。他向打字机制造商雷明顿公司的高管演示了这台原型机。

It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment.

但演示失败了。在关键时刻，机器出了故障。

Dr. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn.

林语堂破产了，这台原型机被卖给了布鲁克林的莫根塔勒莱诺铸排机公司。

And that, as far as Dr. Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine’s last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared.

据墨磊宁了解，这就是这台机器已知的最后下落。20世纪50年代左右，莫根塔勒莱诺铸排机公司搬办公室时，机器随之消失。

In his 2017 book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” Dr. Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.

在2017年出版的《中文打字机》(The Chinese Typewriter)一书中，墨磊宁写道，他认为明快很可能最终进了废品堆。当时没有合适的人去拯救它，去讲述它的故事。

This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Ms. Felix’s father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. “What’s this?” Ms. Felix asked her husband.

今年1月，詹妮弗·费利克斯和纳尔逊·费利克斯在纽约州马萨佩夸的家中整理五年来从亚利桑那州运来的储物箱——詹妮弗的父亲在那里去世。他们看到纸板箱里有个木箱。“这是什么？”詹妮弗问丈夫。

He’d had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it’s that typewriter.

他在亚利桑那州时看过一眼这个箱子。哦，他说，是那台打字机。

中文打字设备的最大挑战在于——将海量字符塞入一台机器中，还要方便使用。

She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Mr. Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” and posted some photos.

她打开箱子，发现这不是普通的打字机。键盘上的符号看起来像中文。纳尔逊经常在Facebook上买卖东西，他很快找到一个叫做“我的打字机值多少钱？”的群组，发了几张照片。

Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Mr. Felix checked on his post.

然后他们把它放一边，去处理其他东西了。一小时后，纳尔逊查看自己的帖子。

There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom.

有几百条评论，很多是中文的。人们不断转发给一个叫汤姆的人。

The couple looked at each other. “Who’s Tom?”

这对夫妇面面相觑：“汤姆是谁？”

Dr. Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off — ping, ping, ping.

当时墨磊宁正在芝加哥做讲座，手机开始不停地响——叮、叮、叮。

The small community of people he’d encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention.

在他多年搜寻过程中遇到的那一小群人，像发出数字信号弹一样，急切地想引起他的注意。

As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai.

他一看到帖子，就确切地知道自己看到了什么。那就是明快。

But he didn’t rejoice. He didn’t sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear.

但他没有欣喜若狂，也没有如释重负，而是被恐惧攫住了。

What if they didn’t know what they had and sold it before he could get to it?

要是他们不知道自己手里有什么宝贝，在他赶到之前就把它卖了怎么办？

Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that.

可能有人在eBay上点一下就能把它买走了。他们可能把它改成咖啡桌，拆开做蒸汽朋克耳环。它就会那样消失不见。

He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone.

他在Facebook上留言，让发帖人立刻联系他。焦急地等了几个小时后，他收到了回复，第二天就和费利克斯夫妇通了电话。

He told them the MingKwai’s story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon.

他给他们讲了明快的故事。他说，虽然这台机器怎么处理由他们决定，但他希望他们能考虑卖给博物馆。他担心如果拿去拍卖，它会消失，成为某个石油大亨度假屋里的一件藏品。

Ms. Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement.

费利克斯夫人对发生的这一切感到困惑。这不过是地下室里的一台打字机。

But Dr. Mullaney had made an impression. “It was lost for half a century,” she said. “We didn’t want it to get lost again.”

但墨磊宁的话给她留下了印象。“它已经消失了半个世纪，”她说，“我们不想再把它弄丢了。”

明快打字机。

“To me it’s just a typewriter,” she continued. “But to other people it’s history; it’s a story, a life, a treasure.”

“对我来说，它只是一台打字机，”她接着说，“但对其他人来说，它是历史，是故事，是人生，是珍宝。”

Dr. Mullaney figured out that Ms. Felix’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It’s likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home.

墨磊宁查明，费利克斯夫人的祖父道格拉斯·阿瑟·荣曾是莫根塔勒莱诺铸排机公司的机械师。公司搬办公室时，他很可能把这台机器带回家了。

Then it was passed down to Ms. Felix’s father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him.

然后它被传给了费利克斯夫人的父亲，十多年来，她父亲一直把明快带在身边。

“That’s what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,” Ms. Felix said.

“我爸爸搬家时，决定带着它横穿全国，”费利克斯夫人说。

Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn’t know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds.

在众多从祖父那里继承的东西里，为什么她的父亲偏偏留着这台打字机？她不知道。但她觉得这一定是刻意的选择：明快重20多公斤，不可能是不小心打包带走的。

In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor.

4月，这对夫妇做了决定。他们把机器卖给了斯坦福大学图书馆，具体金额未披露，图书馆是在一位私人捐赠者的帮助下购买的。