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Stanford University's Tom Mullaney is the author of 'The Chinese Typewriter: A History'. He talks to Gareth Mitchell about the great engineering and linguistic challenge in the 19th and 20th centuries of getting the Chinese language onto a table top machine. The survival of the ancient language or China's entry into the modern world depended on the success of numerous inventors. In fact one consequence was the development of predictive text in the Chinese IT world long before it appeared in the West. First broadcast on Â鶹Éç Inside Science, 5 October 2017.