The San Diego Chinese Historical Museum launches the international debut of Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age, which explores the seemingly impossible Chinese typewriter — a machine that inputs a language with no alphabet yet has more than 70,000 characters. The exhibit is the first of its kind with artifacts from the fields of printing, telegraphy, typewriting, and computing in China, Japan, and Korea.

Explore the art of Chinese writing in the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries through a pair of rare Chinese and Japanese typewriters, a rare 1980’s era Chinese word processor/computer, a curated selection from the world’s largest collection of Chinese telegraph code books (from the 1910s through the 1980s), a compilation of vivid historic photographs and ephemera, film footage, and interactive computer displays. The exhibition runs January 21 to April 16.