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ABOUT

Tom Mullaney

Thomas Mullaney is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, where he is currently working on a project entitled Hot Metal Empire: Script, Media, and Colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, a history of Linotype and its career in the non-Latin alphabetic world. He is also completing a two-volume history of China's development of a nonalphabetic information infrastructure encompassing telegraphy, typewriting, and computing. Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw on The Font that Never Was. The summary of this intersting piece of history dating back to 1921: Since the invention and popularization of hot metal printing in the United States and Europe, engineers and entrepreneurs dreamt of a day when linotype and monotype technologies would conquer the Chinese language, just as they had Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Korean, and over one hundred other scripts. In the early 1920s, the much-celebrated release of a new font---the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet by Mergenthaler Linotype, and later by the Monotype corporation---led many to believe that the day had finally come. In this presentation, I chart out the quixotic history of Linotype and Monotype's efforts to enter the Chinese market, examining the linguistic challenges that had long prevented China's absorption into a Western-dominated "hot metal empire," the design process by which artists in Brooklyn and London crafted these new fonts, and ultimately the profound cultural misunderstandings that doomed the projects to failure.

Speaker at ATypI 2019 in Tokyo on the topic of Sinotype III, the first Chinese bitmap font (which he is trying to revive).

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INTERNAL LINKS
Type scene in California ⦿ Type design in China ⦿ Pixel/bitmap fonts ⦿