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Thursday, August 14, 2003
Originally from
Manufacturer and Builder Magazine, March 1872
How They Telegraph Chinese
The managers of the China Submarine Telegraph Company have solved the somewhat difficult problem of how to transmit telegraphic messages in Chinese. At first light the difficulty of an alphabet which is made up of about fifty thousand distinct characters appears almost insurmountable, but the obstacles have been overcome, and A-fat at Hong-Kong encounters no more difficulty in communicating with A-chum at Shanghai than does Brown with Jones under similar circumstances. The plan adopted is this: Some few thousand of the more common Chinese characters are cut on wooden blocks after the manner of type, and on the reverse end of each is a number cut in the same way. Now A-fat having handed in his message written in Chinese, the native clerk selects in order the corresponding blocks from the case, and prints off the numbers on their reverse. This he hands to his English colleague, who telegraphs the numbers to the destination desired. Here the reverse process is gone through, and the numbers having been taken from the cases the characters are stamped on paper, and thus A-chum is put in possession of the cherished wishes of A-fat through the medium of his native language.
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