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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About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit
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© 1974-2011 Paul Ford
Recent
@20, by Paul Ford.
Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either.
(October 15)
Recent Offsite Work: Code and Prose.
As a hobby I write.
(January 14)
Rotary Dial.
(August 21)
10 Timeframes.
(June 20)
Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out.
(April 10)
Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley.
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Welcome to the Company.
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Forgot to tell you about this.
(July 20)
“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.
An essay for TheMorningNews.org.
(July 11)
Woods+.
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Reading Tonight.
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(May 18)
Recorded Entertainment #1, by Paul Ford.
(May 17)
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It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so
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(1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and
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(May 9)
Bantha Tracks.
(May 5)
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