When Qi Yanhuai and several craftsmen repaired the "wordless typewriter", Huang Yue, the Minister of Rites, rushed to the test site.
Qi Yanhuai and the craftsmen saluted quickly:
"I've met Uncle Zong. Is Uncle Zong free to come to the Ministry of Industry today?"
Fifty-seven-year-old Huang Yue was in good spirits and said with a smile:
"I heard that there will be a simulation test today, so I came over quickly to see how the situation is now?"
Qi Yanhuai didn’t hide anything:
"There was a malfunction just now. It was just repaired. Uncle Zong can come and give it a try."
Huang Yue had already seen the machine on the workbench, and immediately came over and reached out to press the buttons.
Huang Yue followed the development progress throughout the entire process, so he knew the logic of this typewriter.
He stretched out his hand and directly pressed the keys of the four partitions, and then immediately said instinctively:
"Heavy...the buttons in Area A are too heavy..."
Qi Yanhuai said naturally:
“Area A controls a large drum, on which lead can be engraved with more than 8,000 characters, weighing more than ten kilograms.
"You press it, and the whole thing rotates, and it has to be in place before you press four keys.
"You have to stop immediately when you get to the place. This process of accelerating, decelerating, and braking is all about energy."
Huang Yue had already typed three words on his hand, and the machine made three knocking sounds, and then sighed again:
"I think the keystroke rhythm of the machine is okay, but the keys in area A are really heavy.
"We have to find ways to reduce it, otherwise we won't be able to use it for a long time."
Qi Yanhuai is already considering this issue:
“Even if this structure is made of aluminum, it still has to weigh three kilograms.
“If you want to continue to reduce the problem, you have to give up the metal type.
"I have to go back and use wood to make lettering molds, or try plastic..."
Huang Yue continued to type on the keyboard in the first area slowly, watching the big roller continue to rotate:
"Then quickly change the wood or... let's try that plastic. Our coding is almost finished."
Qi Yanhuai thought for a while and said:
"Actually, you can try it now... let's take off part of the lead mold and feel it..."
Qi Yanhuai opened the typewriter, removed the large core roller, and removed forty-eight of the sixty-four small rollers, that is, the sixty-four lead rods, leaving sixteen, and only two were left on each middle roller. A lead rod.
Qi Yanhuai put the big roller into the typewriter cavity again and restored the structure to its original state:
“This is almost the weight of the aluminum alloy font.
"Uncle Da Zong, please try again. Just build the eight buildings in Area A to feel how powerful it is.
"Don't press the keys at the back. There is no lead rod holding it. After pressing the four keys, the hammer will break the paper and ribbon."
Huang Yue pressed it a few more times and said with satisfaction:
"Yes, it's much lighter this way. It's barely usable. Can it be lighter if I replace it with plastic?"
Qi Yanhuai calculated it and said:
“If we use plastic to make the typeface, we can save another three-fifths.
"If it is made of white pear wood, it can be reduced to one-sixth of the current size.
“However, the wood of the wooden version is not hard enough, and it will continue to be knocked during the typing process, so the typeface may need to be replaced frequently.
"If you use harder rosewood, it might weigh more than plastic."
Huang Yue continued to press the keyboard, made a brief assessment and said:
"Then make one set out of plastic and one set out of aluminum alloy, try the weight difference, and do a comparative test."
Qi Yanhuai nodded in agreement and went back to make aluminum alloy and plastic character models.
Let a young craftsman put the current typewriter font back together.
Just click continuously on the spot, record the fault when it is found, fix it and check whether it will happen again.
This continuously verifies the machine's failure rate.
Over the next few days, the typewriter was struck tens of thousands of times.
Nearly a hundred failures of various kinds occurred one after another. After repeated repairs and adjustments, the failure rate gradually decreased a lot.
Qi Yanhuai made several sets of aluminum alloy and plastic character molds in the factory of the Ministry of Industry.
They are still for simulation, they are eight-sided flat cylinders with no words engraved on them.
Not to mention aluminum alloys, plastics already exist in this era.
But not in the modern sense, plastics produced mainly through the petrochemical industry.
Instead, it is in the initial stage of synthetic resins that are naturally synthesized from polymer materials and coal chemical industry.
What Zhu Jingyuan arranged for people to develop is a synthetic material with petroleum as the main raw material.
The primary target is polyethylene, followed by synthetic fibers, that is, "chemical fibers" such as nylon and spandex.
Qi Yanhuai returned to the laboratory of the Ministry of Industry and replaced the typewriter with aluminum and plastic fonts to test the typing effect.
When Huang Yue, the Minister of Household Affairs, went to the Ministry of Industry again to see the progress, he brought the finalized coding list along the way.
Qi Yanhuai handed the typewriter to Huang Yue again, letting the old man feel the feeling of tapping and read the stopwatch himself.
Huang Yue explained to Qi Yanhuai while pressing the button:
“Although the eight-by-eight-by-eight-by-sixteen code table can accommodate the universal standard Chinese character table, the number of redundant codes is too small.
"There are a large number of Chinese characters. According to the encoding rules we set, the positions where they should go cannot be accommodated, so we have to manually move them to encodings that do not comply with the rules.
"Users of this typewriter have to forcibly memorize the unique codes of these Chinese characters."
Qi Yanhuai turned over the form in his hand and asked subconsciously:
"This is not the case for a small roller with a length of 32 squares per surface, right? After all, the coding capacity has doubled."
Huang Yue thought for a while and said:
“It can’t be said that there is none at all, because no matter how we adjust the rules, there are always some Chinese characters whose encoding is exactly the same.
"So we have to keep one with normal encoding and change the other Chinese characters to the empty spaces behind it.
"But this change is easier to remember. Compared with normal encoding, only the last key is different."
Qi Yanhuai didn't know much about Chinese character encoding, while Huang Yue was familiar with it.
The two parties are now working together, so when they encounter problems, they continue to ask and discuss:
"Then if we only require to accommodate universal standard Chinese characters, and at the same time, in order to avoid forced cross-regional large-scale coding changes.
"How many grids are needed on each side of the small roller to achieve the effect of changing only the last key of the repeated code?"
Huang Yue once again recalled the coding discussion and recorded information:
"About twenty-four are enough, for a total of twelve thousand two hundred and eighty-eight coding positions."
Qi Yanhuai thought for a while and said:
"If we don't want to make a formal universal typewriter, we can make it according to the small drum with twenty-four squares on each side.
"In this way, the same characters will be encoded exactly the same on both typewriters and can be switched seamlessly."
Huang Yue pressed the keyboard of the typewriter in front of him:
"Then the keys of the universal typewriter will be heavier again..."
Qi Yanhuai smiled and said:
"Anyway, we have to make a thirty-two-frame one, and that one must be the heaviest. Let's try it with a plastic one."
Qi Yanhuai borrowed the typewriter again and replaced the aluminum alloy fonts on the drum with synthetic resin ones:
“The proportion of plastic is only less than 60% of that of aluminum alloy.
“The length increases from sixteen to twenty-four grids without being heavier than aluminum alloy.
"Uncle Da Zong, let's try it again and see how it works..."
Huang Yue came over again to press the keys and experience the typing effect. This time he was quite satisfied and said:
"Yes, if it weighs this, it will definitely work. Let's quickly make the finished product. His Majesty is waiting to see it."
Qi Yanhuai agreed, took the Chinese character code from the Ministry of Rites, and went to the factory again to prepare new fonts.
There is no need to redo the typewriter. For the convenience of testing, the typewriter was originally made to be wide enough to hold thirty-two spaces.
According to the original plan, the sixteen-frame typewriter brought to the market was reduced from the complete body.
Now to change the design, just change the reduction range from half to one-third.
The typewriter is still handed over to several young craftsmen who take turns tapping it to look for possible faults.
The actual effect of this process is similar to finding bugs.
It will be shown to the emperor later, and it is best not to be the problem during the display.
Possible problems must be identified and resolved in advance as much as possible.
Plastic products are usually made by injection molding, which is where the name plastic comes from, a material that can be molded.
Injection molding requires a metal mold first, and more than 8,000 Chinese characters are engraved on it. Then the molten plastic material is injected and waits for cooling and finalization.
There are no CNC machine tools in this era. Making metal molds is a big project and consumes huge resources.
Therefore, before the typewriter fonts were completely finalized, both the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Rites decided not to make formal font molds.
Instead, the sixty-four resin rods were directly distributed to the sixty-four engraving craftsmen, and a set was first carved out for trial use.
There are more than 8,000 Chinese characters in total. Each craftsman carves fifty characters a day, and it takes three days to finish them.
Four days later, Qi Yanhuai returned to the Ministry of Industry with the plastic fonts and put them back on the prototype typewriter that had been typed hundreds of thousands of times.
Under the watchful eyes of a group of craftsmen, Qi Yanhuai sat down in front of the typewriter and adjusted the machine.
Then I picked up the coding list made by the Rites Department and manually searched for a few words.
Theoretically, after learning the coding logic, you can encode the Chinese characters by yourself without having to look up the table.
But Qi Yanhuai has never learned it, and even the people who design and code have never practiced it at all. This has never been done in Shanghai in this world.
Therefore, the process of Qi Yanhuai's tapping is called a slow, intermittent, slowly tapping one yard after another.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, after waiting for a long time, I finished typing four Chinese characters:
"Da-Ming-An-Kang".
