The Invention of the Arabic Typewriter

By Zeina Dowidar and Ahmed Ellaithy

Many of our listeners came back to us after our latest episode, A Tale of Two Inventors, with questions on the impact and context of the invention of the Arabic typewriter. So in this post, we wanted to provide a little more information on this fascinating story.

I.

BEFORE WE GET INTO IT, LET’S QUICKLY RECAP THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE EPISODE:

The Chicago Fair was the biggest event in 1893. Held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the United States, the Chicago Fair exhibited the newest inventions and technology from around the world, with over 40 foreign pavilions and hundreds of small stalls. Amongst them, in the Midway Plaisance, was a Cairo Street exhibition. The exhibit was made up of over 26 buildings and small winding roads, whose parts were built in Egypt to exactly replicate the atmosphere and environment of downtown Cairo (1) . The exhibit was one of the most popular features of the Chicago Fair — over 2.5 million people flocked to its streets to watch the belly dancers, buy Egyptian trinkets, and ride on the camels (2) .

Somewhere in the cacophony of sounds of Cairo Street was a small machine, which according to traveler’s diaries, absolutely bedazzled all those who came across it — including our two protagonists, Philippe Waked and Selim Haddad. Philippe Waked was Lebanese-Egyptian and would have been around 21 at the time of the Chicago Fair. Selim was almost a decade older at 29 and hailed from Syria. The machine they found did not work very well, however. Ahmed Ellaithy, who brought us this episode, theorises that no one who worked at the American company who manufactured it likely spoke Arabic, and so it would have functioned only as a decorative addition to the exhibit. While the timeline gets a bit fuzzy for a couple of years after the Chicago Fair, we know that they were both there, and were inspired to manufacture a better, working version of the machine.

A map of the Chicago Fair // Rand McNally’s Standard Guide Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), taken from the Newberry Library

Fast forward six years and Selim Haddad files a patent for his Arabic typewriter in August 1899. Three months later, on December 1st, 1899, a British patent was filed … by Philippe Waked. Despite a lawsuit between the two men, confirming that they did work separately, they both found success off of their inventions. Philippe Waked went on to open a store on Meligy Street in Downtown Cairo in 1904, selling over 100 typewriters by 1912 (which would have made him a hefty sum back then). Selim, on the other hand, flew to America to work with a typewriter company there, and according to a New York Times article written about his success,

“both the Sultan of Turkey and the Khedive of Egypt are in possession of handsome machines in white enamel and gold .. and also the Turkish and Persian ministers in Washington” (3).

When both of their patents ran out in 1917, a number of companies rushed in to start manufacturing Arabic typewriters, both in Egypt and abroad.

(3) New York Times article

II.

SO WHAT WAS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THEIR TYPEWRITER DESIGNS?

And why did it take almost three decades from the invention of the typewriter (4) for an Arabic one to be designed? There were several difficulties associated with creating an Arabic typewriter. Firstly, unlike English, which is read left-to-right, Arabic is read right-to-left. Thus, the carriage, which moves the text while typing, needed to be reversed (5). Secondly, Arabic letters are not spaced evenly, as letters are of different widths. This had to be overcome by creating a new mechanism which sits on the back of the typewriter, moving certain letters two spaces automatically. Moreover, One of the biggest challenges, however, was the number of characters. While the English language has 52 characters (the capitalised and small-case glyphs of the 26 letters), the Arabic language has over 603 letters that take on different forms depending on where they are positioned in the word (6). If we include the diacritics and vocalisations that are often written in the Arabic language, an Arabic typewriter would need hundreds of glyphs.

Overcoming this difficulty was the biggest achievement of Haddad and Waked’s design. Both were able to drastically reduce the number of characters needed for the typewriter by simplifying the number of letterforms needed. As explained by Nemeth, “letterforms were designed in such a way that one character could be employed at the beginning, and in the middle of a word, and one character could be used in final and isolated positions” (7). This design revolutionised Arabic type and “for printing and publishing in languages using the Arabic script, the invention of the typewriter had a profound influence beyond the confines of the office desk” (8). The following sections will look at some of those influences, focusing specifically on its impact in modernising the Arabic language, and more widely on the social literary movement of the time.

As typewriters and printing became more popular throughout the region, there was little variation in terms of character design between manufacturers, and in “all Arabic typewriters similar principles of character reduction were employed” (9) like that designed by Haddad. However, intellectuals found a need to standardise Arabic and non-Arabic phonemes, particularly for translation purposes. Thus, in 1945, the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo held a competition to find a new simplified Arabic script to become the new standard. Amongst the entries to this competition was Nasri Khattar’s unified Arabic script (find our episode on Nasri Khattar here). However, one of the most prominent entries was the Yakout typeface, designed by Nahib Jaroudi. Based off of Haddad’s design of a simplified Arabic, Yakout reduced the number of Arabic characters to 56, and according to its promotional material, could increase the output of work by over thirty per cent (10). The Yakout design was adopted by Linotype, then the most popular typewriter company, and the design spread ubiquitously by other manufacturers (11). The Yakout font, to this day, remains one of the most popular Arabic typefaces. The influence of Haddad and Waked’s early keyboard layouts can clearly be seen in modern keyboard layouts today.

III.

However, the importance of the typewriter and the push for the modernisation of the Arabic language can only be understood in the broader context of Al Nahda, or the Arab Renaissance, which was occurring at the time. As Abu-Absi explains,

“the modernization of the Arabic language came as a consequence of the Arab renaissance which started in Egypt and Syria in the nineteenth century and spread to other Arabic speaking regions” (12).

While there were few printing presses in Egypt and the region before Al Nahda (13), the printing industry was a fraction of that in Europe and the Western world. There have been countless explanations as to the reason behind this (14). One that is widely agreed upon is that put forward by Kunt, who explains that it was “a classic case of old technology too efficient to be easily displaced by a new technology too cumbersome and too expensive to become an immediate alternative” (15). Writing and reading was an elitist and intellectual activity, and the majority of society’s daily functions were performed through oral channels; “most daily functions throughout the community were performed by oral/aural channels, from transmitting state messages to the subjects and circulating news across society to leisure-time activities, based as they were on listening, not reading. These channels served the community well, and the modest quantities of written texts it needed to various ends could be adequately produced by handwriting” (16). However, the lag in printing adoption in the Middle East was not only due to socio-cultural reasons. Glass contends that the reason for oral reliance was also technical. The publication of daily newsletters was hardly possible in the 1880s, as the printing presses installed there could print only at very slow rates (17). Thus, printing was reserved for intellectual texts, mostly those focused on science and technology, and reading and writing remained an elitist activity.

However, during the Nahda, and in the context of the typewriter invention, there was a “massive production of written texts, the emergence of new diffusion channels carrying the printed products to customers and, not least, the format not sizeable and ever-expanding reading audience” (18). Literary Arabic suddenly transformed from the language of the elite, to the language of the masses. Typewriters and more technical printing presses allowed for the distribution of texts that weren’t all scientific or religious — thus, the development of novels, for instance, succeeded in transforming the language from being confined to law, religion, and politics into becoming the language of the every day (19).

Typewriters allowed for personal self-expression, and with that came the cementing of classical/colloquial Arabic differences as concern with grammar was gradually abandoned (especially in Egypt) in favour of increasing self-expression (20). Professions such as journalists, authors, printer-publishers, and booksellers, were established for this new modern age,(21), and new diffusion channels for the public to access books such as “bookshops and newspaper vendors, street peddlers and circulation agents, public libraries and reading rooms, book lending shops, literary clubs, mail subscription, and more” (22) became commonplace in society. Thus, the typewriter helped establish literacy across the Arab world, and brought intellectualism down from the upper echelons of society to the masses by making printed texts more accessible for all.

While the last factory producing Arabic typewriters closed its doors in 2011 (23), the impact of the Arabic typewriter has permeated Arab language and society forever. Haddad and Waked’s legacies will live on in the history of our language.

Check out the original post of this story on our Kerned and Cultured blog.

Footnotes

1. Istvan (2012)
2. https://oi.uchicago.edu/museum-exhibits/special-exhibits/cairo-chicago
3. See: New York Times article (in image gallery)
4. https://www.britannica.com/technology/typewriter
5. ibid
6. https://jawaheralhajri.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/brief-history-of-the-traditional-arabic-type/
7. Nemeth (2017), p. 75
8. Ibid, p. 81
9. Ibid, p. 78
10. Ross (2002)
11. ibid.
12. Abu-Absi (1986), p. 337
13. https://www.bibalex.org/en/center/details/BulaqPress
14. See Ayalon (2016), p. 10–14
15. Kunt (2008), p. 97
16. Ayalon (2016), p. 16
17. Glass (2002), p. 211
18. Ayalon (2010), p. 83
19. Ayoub (2002)
20. ibid.
21. Nemeth (2017), p. 31
22. Ayalon (2010), p. 75
23. Jackson (2011)