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A country’s economic security—its ability to generate both national security and economic prosperity—is grounded in it having significant technological capabilities that outpace those of its adversaries and complement those of its allies. Though this is a principle well known throughout history, the move over the last few decades toward globalization and offshoring of technologically advanced industrial capacity has made ensuring a nation state’s security and economic prosperity increasingly problematic. A broad span of technologies ranging from automation and secure communications to energy storage and vaccine design are the basis for wider economic prosperity—and high priorities for governments seeking to maintain national security. However, the necessary capabilities do not spring up overnight. They rely upon long decades of development, years of accumulated knowledge, and robust supply chains.

For the US and, especially, its allies in NATO, a particular problem has emerged: a “missing middle” in technology investment. Insufficient capital is allocated toward the maturation of breakthroughs in critical technologies to ensure that they can be deployed at scale. Investment is allocated either toward the rapid deployment of existing technologies or to scientific ideas that are decades away from delivering practical capability or significant economic impact (for example, quantum computers). But investment in scaling manufacturing technologies, learning while doing, and maturing of emerging technologies to contribute to a next-generation industrial base, is too often absent. Without this middle-ground commitment, the United States and its partners lack the production know-how that will be crucial for tomorrow’s batteries, the next generation of advanced computing, alternative solar photovoltaic cells, and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

While this once mattered only for economic prosperity, it is now a concern for national security too—especially given that China has built strong supply chains and other domestic capabilities that confer both economic security and significant geopolitical leverage.

Consider drone technology. Military doctrine has shifted toward battlefield technology that relies upon armies of small, relatively cheap products enabled by sophisticated software—from drones above the battlefield to autonomous boats to CubeSats in space.

Drones have played a central role in the war in Ukraine. First-person viewer (FPV) drones—those controlled by a pilot on the ground via a video stream—are often strapped with explosives to act as precision kamikaze munitions and have been essential to Ukraine’s frontline defenses. While many foundational technologies for FPV drones were pioneered in the West, China now dominates the manufacturing of drone components and systems, which ultimately enables the country to have a significant influence on the outcome of the war.

When the history of the war in Ukraine is written, it will be taught as the first true “drone war.” But it should also be understood as an industrial wake-up call: a time when the role of a drone’s component parts was laid bare and the supply chains that support this technology—the knowledge, production operations, and manufacturing processes—were found wanting. Heroic stories will be told of Ukrainian ingenuity in building drones with Chinese parts in basements and on kitchen tables, and we will hear of the country’s attempt to rebuild supply chains dominated by China while in the midst of an existential fight for survival. But in the background, we will also need to understand the ways in which other nations, especially China, controlled the war through long-term economic policies focused on capturing industrial capacity that the US and its allies failed to support through to maturity.

Disassemble one of the FPV drones found across the battlefields of Ukraine and you will find about seven critical subsystems: power, propulsion, flight control, navigation and sensors (which gather location data and other information to support flight), compute (the processing and memory capacity needed to analyze the vast array of information and then support operations), communications (to connect the drone to the ground), and—supporting it all—the airframe.

We have created a bill of materials listing the components necessary to build an FPV drone and the common suppliers for those parts.

China’s manufacturing dominance has resulted in a domestic workforce with the experience to achieve process innovations and product improvements that have no equal in the West.  And it has come with the sophisticated supply chains that support a wide range of today’s technological capabilities and serve as the foundations for the next generation. None of that was inevitable. For example, most drone electronics are integrated on printed circuit boards (PCBs), a technology that was developed in the UK and US. However, first-mover advantage was not converted into long-term economic or national security outcomes, and both countries have lost the PCB supply chain to China.

Propulsion is another case in point. The brushless DC motors used to convert electrical energy from batteries into mechanical energy to rotate drone propellers were invented in the US and Germany. The sintered permanent neodymium (NdFeB) magnets used in these motors were invented in Japan and the US. Today, to our knowledge, all brushless DC motors for drones are made in China. Similarly, China dominates all steps in the processing and manufacture of NdFeB magnets, accounting for 92% of global NdFeB magnet and magnet alloy markets.

The missing middle of technology investment—insufficient funding for commercial production—is evident in each and every one of these failures, but the loss of expertise is an added dimension. For example, lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries are at the heart of every FPV drone. LiPo uses a solid or gel polymer electrolyte and achieves higher specific energy (energy per unit of weight)—a feature that is crucial for lightweight drones. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a LiPo battery that was not manufactured in China. The experienced workforce behind these companies has contributed to learning curves that have led to a 97% drop in the cost of lithium-ion batteries and a simultaneous 300%-plus increase in battery energy density over the past three decades.

China’s dominance in LiPo batteries for drones reflects its overall dominance in Li-ion manufacturing. China controls approximately 75% of global lithium-ion capacity—the anode, cathode, electrolyte, and separator subcomponents as well as the assembly into a single unit. It dominates the manufacture of each of these subcomponents, producing over 85% of anodes and over 70% of cathodes, electrolytes, and separators. China also controls the extraction and refinement of minerals needed to make these subcomponents.

Again, this dominance was not inevitable. Most of the critical breakthroughs needed to invent and commercialize Li-ion batteries were made by scientists in North America and Japan. But in comparison to the US and Europe (at least until very recently), China has taken a proactive stance to coordinate, support, and co-invest with strategic industries to commercialize emerging technologies. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has been at pains to support these domestic industries.

The case of Li-ion batteries is not an isolated one. The shift to Chinese dominance in the underlying electronics for FPV drones coincides with the period beginning in 2000, when Shenzhen started to emerge as a global hub for low-cost electronics. This trend was amplified by US corporations from Apple, for which low-cost production in China has been essential, to General Electric, which also sought low-cost approaches to maintain the competitive edge of its products. The global nature of supply chains was seen as a strength for US companies, whose comparative advantage lay in the design and integration of consumer products (such as smartphones) with little or no relevance for national security. Only a small handful of “exquisite systems” essential for military purposes were carefully developed within the US. And even those have relied upon global supply chains.

While the absence of the high-tech industrial capacity needed for economic security is easy to label, it is not simple to address. Doing so requires several interrelated elements, among them designing and incentivizing appropriate capital investments, creating and matching demand for a talented technology workforce, building robust industrial infrastructure, ensuring visibility into supply chains, and providing favorable financial and regulatory environments for on- and friend-shoring of production. This is a project that cannot be done by the public or the private sector alone. Nor is the US likely to accomplish it absent carefully crafted shared partnerships with allies and partners across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The opportunity to support today’s drones may have passed, but we do have the chance to build a strong industrial base to support tomorrow’s most critical technologies—not simply the eye-catching finished assemblies of autonomous vehicles, satellites, or robots but also their essential components. This will require attention to our manufacturing capabilities, our supply chains, and the materials that are the essential inputs. Alongside a shift in emphasis to our own domestic industrial base must come a willingness to plan and partner more effectively with allies and partners.

If we do so, we will transform decades of US and allied support for foundational science and technology into tomorrow’s industrial base vital for economic prosperity and national security. But to truly take advantage of this opportunity, we need to value and support our shared, long-term economic security. And this means rewarding patient investment in projects that take a decade or more, incentivizing high-capital industrial activity, and maintaining a determined focus on education and workforce development—all within a flexible regulatory framework.

Edlyn V. Levine is CEO and co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Physics at Harvard University. Levine was co-founder and CSO of America’s Frontier Fund, and formerly Chief Technologist for the MITRE Corporation.

Fiona Murray is the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT School of Management where she works at the intersection of critical technologies, entrepreneurship, and geopolitics. She is the Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund—a multi-sovereign venture fund for defense, security and resilience, and served for a decade on the UK Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology.

Earlier this month, China announced that it is pouring 6 billion yuan (about US $826 million) into a fund meant to spur the development of solid-state batteries by the nation’s leading battery manufacturers. Solid-state batteries use electrolytes of either glass, ceramic, or solid polymer material instead of the liquid lithium salts that are in the vast majority of today’s electric vehicle (EV) batteries. They’re greatly anticipated because they will have three or four times as much energy density as batteries with liquid electrolytes, offer more charge-discharge cycles over their lifetimes, and be far less susceptible to the thermal runaway reaction that occasionally causes lithium batteries to catch fire.

But China’s investment in the future of batteries won’t likely speed up the timetable for mass production and use in production vehicles. As IEEE Spectrum pointed out in January, it’s not realistic to look for solid-state batteries in production vehicles anytime soon. Experts Spectrum consulted at the time “noted a pointed skepticism toward the technical merits of these announcements. None could isolate anything on the horizon indicating that solid-state technology can escape the engineering and ‘production hell’ that lies ahead.”

“To state at this point that any one battery and any one country’s investments in battery R&D will dominate in the future is simply incorrect.” —Steve W. Martin, Iowa State University

Reaching scale production of solid-state batteries for EVs will first require validating existing solid-state battery technologies—now being used for other, less demanding applications—in terms of performance, life-span, and relative cost for vehicle propulsion. Researchers must still determine how those batteries take and hold a charge and deliver power as they age. They’ll also need to provide proof that a glass or ceramic battery can stand up to the jarring that comes with driving on bumpy roads and certify that it can withstand the occasional fender bender.

Here Come Semi-Solid-State Batteries

Meanwhile, as the world waits for solid electrolytes to shove liquids aside, Chinese EV manufacturer Nio and battery maker WeLion New Energy Technology Co. have partnered to stake a claim on the market for a third option that splits the difference: semi-solid-state batteries, with gel electrolytes.

CarNewsChina.com reported in April that the WeLion cells have an energy density of 360 watt-hours per kilogram. Fully packaged, the battery’s density rating is 260 Wh/kg. That’s still a significant improvement over lithium iron phosphate batteries, whose density tops out at 160 Wh/kg. In tests conducted last month with Nio’s EVs in Shanghai, Chengdu, and several other cities, the WeLion battery packs delivered more than 1,000 kilometers of driving range on a single charge. Nio says it plans to roll out the new battery type across its vehicle lineup beginning this month.

But the Beijing government’s largesse and the Nio-WeLion partnership’s attempt to be first to get semi-solid-state batteries into production vehicles shouldn’t be a temptation to call the EV propulsion game prematurely in China’s favor.

So says Steve W. Martin, a professor of materials science and engineering at Iowa State University, in Ames. Martin, whose research areas include glassy solid electrolytes for solid-state lithium batteries and high-capacity reversible anodes for lithium batteries, believes that solid-state batteries are the future and that hybrid semi-solid batteries will likely be a transition between liquid and solid-state batteries. However, he says, “to state at this point that any one battery and any one country’s investments in battery R&D will dominate in the future is simply incorrect.” Martin explains that “there are too many different kinds of solid-state batteries being developed right now and no one of these has a clear technological lead.”

The Advantages of Semi-Solid-State Batteries

The main innovation that gives semi-solid-state batteries an advantage over conventional batteries is the semisolid electrolyte from which they get their name. The gel electrolyte contains ionic conductors such as lithium salts just as liquid electrolytes do, but the way they are suspended in the gel matrix supports much more efficient ion conductivity. Enhanced transport of ions from one side of the battery to the other boosts the flow of current in the opposite direction that makes a complete circuit. This is important during the charging phase because the process happens more rapidly than it can in a battery with a liquid electrolyte. The gel’s structure also resists the formation of dendrites, the needlelike structures that can form on the anode during charging and cause short circuits. Additionally, gels are less volatile than liquid electrolytes and are therefore less prone to catching fire.

Though semi-solid-state batteries won’t reach the energy densities and life-spans that are expected from those with solid electrolytes, they’re at an advantage in the short term because they can be made on conventional lithium-ion battery production lines. Just as important, they have been tested and are available now rather than at some as yet unknown date.

Semi-solid-state batteries can be made on conventional lithium-ion battery production lines.

Several companies besides WeLion are actively developing semi-solid-state batteries. China’s prominent battery manufacturers, including CATL, BYD, and the state-owned automakers FAW Group and SAIC Group are, like WeLion, beneficiaries of Beijing’s plans to advance next-generation battery technology domestically. Separately, the startup Farasis Energy, founded in Ganzhou, China, in 2009, is collaborating with Mercedes-Benz to commercialize advanced batteries.

The Road Forward to Solid-State Batteries

U.S. startup QuantumScape says the solid-state lithium metal batteries it’s developing will offer energy density of around 400 Wh/kg. The company notes that its cells eliminate the charging bottleneck that occurs in conventional lithium-ion cells, where lithium must diffuse into the carbon particles. QuantumScape’s advanced batteries will therefore allow fast charging from 10 to 80 percent in 15 minutes. That’s a ways off, but the Silicon Valley–based company announced in March that it had begun shipping its prototype Alpha-2 semi-solid-state cells to manufacturers for testing.

Toyota is among a group of companies not looking to hedge their bets. The automaker, ignoring naysayers, aims to commercialize solid-state batteries by 2027 that it says will give an EV a range of 1,200 km on a single charge and allow 10-minute fast charging. It attributes its optimism to breakthroughs addressing durability issues. And for companies like Solid Power, it’s also solid-state or bust. Solid Power, which aims to commercialize a lithium battery with a proprietary sulfide-based solid electrolyte, has partnered with major automakers Ford and BMW. ProLogium Technology, which is also forging ahead with preparations for a solid-state battery rollout, claims that it will start delivering batteries this year that combine a ceramic oxide electrolyte with a lithium-free soft cathode (for energy density exceeding 500 Wh/kg). The company, which has teamed up with Mercedes-Benz, demonstrated confidence in its timetable by opening the world’s first giga-level solid-state lithium ceramic battery factory earlier this year in Taoyuan, Taiwan.

“This will destroy China forever,” a young Taiwanese cadet thought as he sat in rapt attention. The renowned historian Arnold J. Toynbee was on stage, delivering a lecture at Washington and Lee University on “A Changing World in Light of History.” The talk plowed the professor’s favorite field of inquiry: the genesis, growth, death, and disintegration of human civilizations, immortalized in his magnum opus A Study of History. Tonight’s talk threw the spotlight on China.

China was Toynbee’s outlier: Ancient as Egypt, it was a civilization that had survived the ravages of time. The secret to China’s continuity, he argued, was character-based Chinese script. Character-based script served as a unifying medium, placing guardrails against centrifugal forces that might otherwise have ripped this grand and diverse civilization apart. This millennial integrity was now under threat. Indeed, as Toynbee spoke, the government in Beijing was busily deploying Hanyu pinyin, a Latin alphabet–based Romanization system.

The Taiwanese cadet listening to Toynbee was Chan-hui Yeh, a student of electrical engineering at the nearby Virginia Military Institute (VMI). That evening with Arnold Toynbee forever altered the trajectory of his life. It changed the trajectory of Chinese computing as well, triggering a cascade of events that later led to the formation of arguably the first successful Chinese IT company in history: Ideographix, founded by Yeh 14 years after Toynbee stepped offstage.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chinese computing underwent multiple sea changes. No longer limited to small-scale laboratories and solo inventors, the challenge of Chinese computing was taken up by engineers, linguists, and entrepreneurs across Asia, the United States, and Europe—including Yeh’s adoptive home of Silicon Valley.

Chan-hui Yeh’s IPX keyboard featured 160 main keys, with 15 characters each. A peripheral keyboard of 15 keys was used to select the character on each key. Separate “shift” keys were used to change all of the character assignments of the 160 keys. Computer History Museum

The design of Chinese computers also changed dramatically. None of the competing designs that emerged in this era employed a QWERTY-style keyboard. Instead, one of the most successful and celebrated systems—the IPX, designed by Yeh—featured an interface with 120 levels of “shift,” packing nearly 20,000 Chinese characters and other symbols into a space only slightly larger than a QWERTY interface. Other systems featured keyboards with anywhere from 256 to 2,000 keys. Still others dispensed with keyboards altogether, employing a stylus and touch-sensitive tablet, or a grid of Chinese characters wrapped around a rotating cylindrical interface. It’s as if every kind of interface imaginable was being explored except QWERTY-style keyboards.

IPX: Yeh’s 120-dimensional hypershift Chinese keyboard

Yeh graduated from VMI in 1960 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. He went on to Cornell University, receiving his M.S. in nuclear engineering in 1963 and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1965. Yeh then joined IBM, not to develop Chinese text technologies but to draw upon his background in automatic control to help develop computational simulations for large-scale manufacturing plants, like paper mills, petrochemical refineries, steel mills, and sugar mills. He was stationed in IBM’s relatively new offices in San Jose, Calif.

Toynbee’s lecture stuck with Yeh, though. While working at IBM, he spent his spare time exploring the electronic processing of Chinese characters. He felt convinced that the digitization of Chinese must be possible, that Chinese writing could be brought into the computational age. Doing so, he felt, would safeguard Chinese script against those like Chairman Mao Zedong, who seemed to equate Chinese modernization with the Romanization of Chinese script. The belief was so powerful that Yeh eventually quit his good-paying job at IBM to try and save Chinese through the power of computing.

Yeh started with the most complex parts of the Chinese lexicon and worked back from there. He fixated on one character in particular: ying 鷹 (“eagle”), an elaborate graph that requires 24 brushstrokes to compose. If he could determine an appropriate data structure for such a complex character, he reasoned, he would be well on his way. Through careful analysis, he determined that a bitmap comprising 24 vertical dots and 20 horizontal dots would do the trick, taking up 60 bytes of memory, excluding metadata. By 1968, Yeh felt confident enough to take the next big step—to patent his project, nicknamed “Iron Eagle.” The Iron Eagle project quickly garnered the interest of the Taiwanese military. Four years later, with the promise of Taiwanese government funding, Yeh founded Ideographix, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

A single key of the IPX keyboard contained 15 characters. This key contains the character zhong (中 “central”), which is necessary to spell “China.” MIT Press

The flagship product of Ideographix was the IPX, a computational typesetting and transmission system for Chinese built upon the complex orchestration of multiple subsystems.

The marvel of the IPX system was the keyboard subsystem, which enabled operators to enter a theoretical maximum of 19,200 Chinese characters despite its modest size: 59 centimeters wide, 37 cm deep, and 11 cm tall. To achieve this remarkable feat, Yeh and his colleagues decided to treat the keyboard not merely as an electronic peripheral but as a full-fledged computer unto itself: a microprocessor-controlled “intelligent terminal” completely unlike conventional QWERTY-style devices.

Seated in front of the IPX interface, the operator looked down on 160 keys arranged in a 16-by-10 grid. Each key contained not a single Chinese character but a cluster of 15 characters arranged in a miniature 3-by-5 array. Those 160 keys with 15 characters on each key yielded 2,400 Chinese characters.

The process of typing on the IPX keyboard involved using a booklet of characters used to depress one of 160 keys, selecting one of 15 numbers to pick a character within the key, and using separate “shift” keys to indicate when a page of the booklet was flipped. MIT Press

Chinese characters were not printed on the keys, the way that letters and numbers are emblazoned on the keys of QWERTY devices. The 160 keys themselves were blank. Instead, the 2,400 Chinese characters were printed on laminated paper, bound together in a spiral-bound booklet that the operator laid down flat atop the IPX interface.The IPX keys weren’t buttons, as on a QWERTY device, but pressure-sensitive pads. An operator would push down on the spiral-bound booklet to depress whichever key pad was directly underneath.

To reach characters 2,401 through 19,200, the operator simply turned the spiral-bound booklet to whichever page contained the desired character. The booklets contained up to eight pages—and each page contained 2,400 characters—so the total number of potential symbols came to just shy of 20,000.

For the first seven years of its existence, the use of IPX was limited to the Taiwanese military. As years passed, the exclusivity relaxed, and Yeh began to seek out customers in both the private and public sectors. Yeh’s first major nonmilitary clients included Taiwan’s telecommunication administration and the National Taxation Bureau of Taipei. For the former, the IPX helped process and transmit millions of phone bills. For the latter, it enabled the production of tax return documents at unprecedented speed and scale. But the IPX wasn’t the only game in town.

Loh Shiu-chang, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, developed what he called “Loh’s keyboard” (Le shi jianpan 樂氏鍵盤), featuring 256 keys. Loh Shiu-chang

Mainland China’s “medium-sized” keyboards

By the mid-1970s, the People’s Republic of China was far more advanced in the arena of mainframe computing than most outsiders realized. In July 1972, just months after the famed tour by U.S. president Richard Nixon, a veritable blue-ribbon committee of prominent American computer scientists visited the PRC. The delegation visited China’s main centers of computer science at the time, and upon learning what their counterparts had been up to during the many years of Sino-American estrangement, the delegation was stunned.

But there was one key arena of computing that the delegation did not bear witness to: the computational processing of Chinese characters. It was not until October 1974 that mainland Chinese engineers began to dive seriously into this problem. Soon after, in 1975, the newly formed Chinese Character Information Processing Technology Research Office at Peking University set out upon the goal of creating a “Chinese Character Information Processing and Input System” and a “Chinese Character Keyboard.”

The group evaluated more than 10 proposals for Chinese keyboard designs. The designs fell into three general categories: a large-keyboard approach, with one key for every commonly used character; a small-keyboard approach, like the QWERTY-style keyboard; and a medium-size keyboard approach, which attempted to tread a path between these two poles.

Peking University’s medium-sized keyboard design included a combination of Chinese characters and character components, as shown in this explanatory diagram. Public Domain

The team leveled two major criticisms against QWERTY-style small keyboards. First, there were just too few keys, which meant that many Chinese characters were assigned identical input sequences. What’s more, QWERTY keyboards did a poor job of using keys to their full potential. For the most part, each key on a QWERTY keyboard was assigned only two symbols, one of which required the operator to depress and hold the shift key to access. A better approach, they argued, was the technique of “one key, many uses”— yijian duoyong—assigning each key a larger number of symbols to make the most use of interface real estate.

The team also examined the large-keyboard approach, in which 2,000 or more commonly used Chinese characters were assigned to a tabletop-size interface. Several teams across China worked on various versions of these large keyboards. The Peking team, however, regarded the large-keyboard approach as excessive and unwieldy. Their goal was to exploit each key to its maximum potential, while keeping the number of keys to a minimum.

After years of work, the team in Beijing settled upon a keyboard with 256 keys, 29 of which would be dedicated to various functions, such as carriage return and spacing, and the remaining 227 used to input text. Each keystroke generated an 8-bit code, stored on punched paper tape (hence the choice of 256, or 28, keys). These 8-bit codes were then translated into a 14-bit internal code, which the computer used to retrieve the desired character.

In their assignment of multiple characters to individual keys, the team’s design was reminiscent of Ideographix’s IPX machine. But there was a twist. Instead of assigning only full-bodied, stand-alone Chinese characters to each key, the team assigned a mixture of both Chinese characters and character components. Specifically, each key was associated with up to four symbols, divided among three varieties:

• full-body Chinese characters (limited to no more than two per key)
• partial Chinese character components (no more than three per key)
• the uppercase symbol, reserved for switching to other languages (limited to one per key)

In all, the keyboard contained 423 full-body Chinese characters and 264 character components. When arranging these 264 character components on the keyboard, the team hit upon an elegant and ingenious way to help operators remember the location of each: They treated the keyboard as if it were a Chinese character itself. The team placed each of the 264 character components in the regions of the keyboard that corresponded to the areas where they usually appeared in Chinese characters.

In its final design, the Peking University keyboard was capable of inputting a total of 7,282 Chinese characters, which in the team’s estimation would account for more than 90 percent of all characters encountered on an average day. Within this character set, the 423 most common characters could be produced via one keystroke; 2,930 characters could be produced using two keystrokes; and a further 3,106 characters could be produced using three keystrokes. The remaining 823 characters required four or five keystrokes.

The Peking University keyboard was just one of many medium-size designs of the era. IBM created its own 256-key keyboard for Chinese and Japanese. In a design reminiscent of the IPX system, this 1970s-era keyboard included a 12-digit keypad with which the operator could “shift” between the 12 full-body Chinese characters outfitted on each key (for a total of 3,072 characters in all). In 1980, Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Loh Shiu-chang developed what he called “Loh’s keyboard” (Le shi jianpan 樂氏鍵盤), which also featured 256 keys.

But perhaps the strangest Chinese keyboard of the era was designed in England.

The cylindrical Chinese keyboard

On a winter day in 1976, a young boy in Cambridge, England, searched for his beloved Meccano set. A predecessor of the American Erector set, the popular British toy offered aspiring engineers hours of modular possibility. Andrew had played with the gears, axles, and metal plates recently, but today they were nowhere to be found.

Wandering into the kitchen, he caught the thief red-handed: his father, the Cambridge University researcher Robert Sloss. For three straight days and nights, Sloss had commandeered his son’s toy, engrossed in the creation of a peculiar gadget that was cylindrical and rotating. It riveted the young boy’s attention—and then the attention of the Telegraph-Herald, which dispatched a journalist to see it firsthand. Ultimately, it attracted the attention and financial backing of the U.K. telecommunications giant Cable & Wireless.

Robert Sloss was building a Chinese computer.

The elder Sloss was born in 1927 in Scotland. He joined the British navy, and was subjected to a series of intelligence tests that revealed a proclivity for foreign languages. In 1946 and 1947, he was stationed in Hong Kong. Sloss went on to join the civil service as a teacher and later, in the British air force, became a noncommissioned officer. Owing to his pedagogical experience, his knack for language, and his background in Asia, he was invited to teach Chinese at Cambridge and appointed to a lectureship in 1972.

At Cambridge, Sloss met Peter Nancarrow. Twelve years Sloss’s junior, Nancarrow trained as a physicist but later found work as a patent agent. The bearded 38-year-old then taught himself Norwegian and Russian as a “hobby” before joining forces with Sloss in a quest to build an automatic Chinese-English translation machine.

In 1976, Robert Sloss and Peter Nancarrow designed the Ideo-Matic Encoder, a Chinese input keyboard with a grid of 4,356 keys wrapped around a cylinder. PK Porthcurno

They quickly found that the choke point in their translator design was character input— namely, how to get handwritten Chinese characters, definitions, and syntax data into a computer.

Over the following two years, Sloss and Nancarrow dedicated their energy to designing a Chinese computer interface. It was this effort that led Sloss to steal and tinker with his son’s Meccano set. Sloss’s tinkering soon bore fruit: a working prototype that the duo called the “Binary Signal Generator for Encoding Chinese Characters into Machine-compatible form”—also known as the Ideo-Matic Encoder and the Ideo-Matic 66 (named after the machine’s 66-by-66 grid of characters).

Each cell in the machine’s grid was assigned a binary code corresponding to the X-column and the Y-row values. In terms of total space, each cell was 7 millimeters squared, with 3,500 of the 4,356 cells dedicated to Chinese characters. The rest were assigned to Japanese syllables or left blank.

The distinguishing feature of Sloss and Nancarrow’s interface was not the grid, however. Rather than arranging their 4,356 cells across a rectangular interface, the pair decided to wrap the grid around a rotating, tubular structure. The typist used one hand to rotate the cylindrical grid and the other hand to move a cursor left and right to indicate one of the 4,356 cells. The depression of a button produced a binary signal that corresponded to the selected Chinese character or other symbol.

The Ideo-Matic Encoder was completed and delivered to Cable & Wireless in the closing years of the 1970s. Weighing in at 7 kilograms and measuring 68 cm wide, 57 cm deep, and 23 cm tall, the machine garnered industry and media attention. Cable & Wireless purchased rights to the machine in hopes of mass-manufacturing it for the East Asian market.

QWERTY’s comeback

The IPX, the Ideo-Matic 66, Peking University’s medium-size keyboards, and indeed all of the other custom-built devices discussed here would soon meet exactly the same fate—oblivion. There were changes afoot. The era of custom-designed Chinese text-processing systems was coming to an end. A new era was taking shape, one that major corporations, entrepreneurs, and inventors were largely unprepared for. This new age has come to be known by many names: the software revolution, the personal-computing revolution, and less rosily, the death of hardware.

From the late 1970s onward, custom-built Chinese interfaces steadily disappeared from marketplaces and laboratories alike, displaced by wave upon wave of Western-built personal computers crashing on the shores of the PRC. With those computers came the resurgence of QWERTY for Chinese input, along the same lines as the systems used by Sinophone computer users today—ones mediated by a software layer to transform the Latin alphabet into Chinese characters. This switch to typing mediated by an input method editor, or IME, did not lead to the downfall of Chinese civilization, as the historian Arnold Toynbee may have predicted. However, it did fundamentally change the way Chinese speakers interact with the digital world and their own language.

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue.