When Qi Yanhuai and several craftsmen repaired the "wordless typewriter", Huang Yue, the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, rushed to the test site.

Qi Yanhuai and the craftsmen hurriedly saluted:

"I've seen Uncle Zong, Uncle Zongzong has time to come to the Ministry of Industry today?"

Fifty-seven-year-old Huang Yue said with a very good smile:

"The old man heard about today's mock test, so hurry up and take a look, how is the situation now?"

Qi Yanhuai doesn't hide anything:

"There was a fault just now, and it has just been repaired, so the big uncle can come and try it."

Huang Yue had already seen the machine on the workbench, and immediately walked over and reached out to press the button.

Huang Yue tracked the progress of research and development throughout the process, so he knew the logic of this typewriter.

Reach out and press the keys of the four partitions directly, and then immediately instinctively say:

"Heavy...... The buttons in the first area are too heavy......"

Qi Yanhuai said as a matter of course:

"Area A controls a large roller, on which more than 8,000 characters of lead are carved, more than a dozen kilograms of things.

"You press this and it spins all the way, and it turns into place before you press the four keys.

"When you get to the place, you have to stop immediately, and this process of acceleration, deceleration, and braking is all energy."

Huang Yue had already typed three words in his hand, and the machine made three tapping sounds, and then sighed again:

The old man thought that the rhythm of the machine's keystrokes was okay, but the keys in the first area were really heavy.

"You have to find a way to reduce it, otherwise you can't use it for a long time."

Qi Yanhuai is already thinking about this problem:

"Even if the structure were to be made of aluminum, it would have to weigh three kilograms.

"If you want to continue to lighten, you can only give up the metal lettering.

"I'll have to go back to making a typeface out of wood, or try plastic......"

Huang Yue continued to slowly tap on the keyboard in the first area, watching the big drum continue to rotate:

"Then hurry up and change the wood or...... Let's try that plastic, we're almost done with the coding. ”

Qi Yanhuai thought for a while and said:

"Actually, you can try it now...... Let's take off part of the lead mold and feel it......"

Qi Yanhuai turned on the typewriter, removed the big drum at the core, and removed the sixty-four small rollers on it, that is, the sixty-four lead rods, forty-eight, leaving sixteen, and two lead rods left on each middle roller.

Qi Yanhuai once again put the big drum into the typewriter cavity and restored the structure to its original state:

"That's about the weight of the aluminum alloy glyph.

"Uncle Zong, if you try again, you will build it according to the eight in District A and feel its strength.

"Don't press the back button, there is no lead bar against it now, and after pressing four keys, the hammer can break the paper and ribbon."

Huang Yue pressed it a few more times and said with satisfaction:

"Yes, it's much lighter, it's barely usable, can it be lighter with that plastic?"

Qi Yanhuai said after doing the math:

"Changing plastic to make a typeface can reduce it by another three-fifths.

"If you make it with white pear wood carving, you can reduce it by one-sixth of what it is now.

"However, the wood is not hard enough, and it will be continuously hammered during the typing process, and the font may need to be changed frequently.

"If you use harder rosewood, it might weigh more than plastic."

Huang Yue continued to press the keyboard, briefly evaluated it and said:

"Then make one set with plastic and one with aluminum alloy, try the weight difference, and compare and test."

Qi Yanhuai nodded and agreed, and went back to make aluminum alloy and plastic font models.

Let a young craftsman put back the typewriter with the current typewriter.

Just on the spot, the continuous clicking, if the fault is found, it is recorded, repaired and checked if it will be reproduced.

This continuously verifies the failure rate of the machine.

Over the course of the next few days, the typewriter was repeatedly struck tens of thousands of times.

Nearly 100 failures have occurred one after another, and after being repeatedly repaired and adjusted, the failure rate has gradually decreased a lot.

Qi Yanhuai made several sets of aluminum alloy and plastic letterings in the factory of the Ministry of Industry.

It is still used for simulation, and it is all eight flat cylinders with no inscriptions on them.

Needless to say, aluminum alloy, plastic is actually already available in this era.

However, it is not in the modern sense of the word, and the plastic is mainly produced by the petrochemical industry.

It is in the initial stage of natural polymer material synthesis and coal chemical industry-based synthetic resin.

What Zhu Jingyuan is developing is a synthetic material with petroleum as the main raw material.

The primary target is polyethylene, followed by synthetic fibers, that is, "chemical fibers" such as nylon and spandex.

Qi Yanhuai returned to the laboratory of the Ministry of Industry and replaced the typewriter with aluminum and plastic typesets to test the typing effect.

When Huang Yue, the head of the household department, went to the Ministry of Industry again to see the progress, he brought the final coding table by the way.

Qi Yanhuai handed over the typewriter to Huang Yue again, and asked the old man to feel the feeling of typing and look at the code meter by himself.

Huang Yue pressed the button and explained to Qi Yanhuai:

"The eight-by-eight-by-eight-by-sixteen code table can accommodate the general standard Chinese character table, but the number of redundant codes is too small.

"There are a large number of Chinese characters, and according to the encoding rules we have formulated, they cannot be accommodated in the positions where they should go, so we have to manually move them to the encoding that does not meet the rules.

"Users of this typewriter have to forcibly memorize the specific codes of these Chinese characters."

Qi Yanhuai flipped through the form in his hand and subconsciously asked:

"This doesn't exist with a small drum with a length of 32 blocks per face, right? After all, the encoding capacity has doubled. ”

Huang Yue thought for a while and said:

"It can't be said that there is nothing at all, because no matter how we adjust the rules, there are always some Chinese characters that are encoded exactly the same.

"So we have to keep one with the normal encoding, and change the other Chinese characters to the space behind the peers.

"However, this change is easier to remember, and compared to normal coding, only the last key is different."

Qi Yanhuai doesn't know much about Chinese character encoding, while Huang Yue is a door clearer.

The two sides are now working together, so when they encounter problems, they continue to ask and discuss:

"If only the general standard Chinese characters are required, and at the same time, in order to avoid forcibly changing the code across regions.

"To achieve the effect of changing the last key of the heavy code word, how many grids do you need on each side of the small drum?"

Huang Yue recalls the information discussed and recorded in the code:

"Probably less than twenty-four is enough, a total of twelve thousand two hundred and eighty-eight coding positions."

Qi Yanhuai thought for a while and said:

"If it is not a formal popular typewriter, it will be made according to the small drum with 24 squares per side.

"In this way, on both typewriters, the same word is encoded exactly the same, and it can be switched seamlessly."

Huang Yue pressed the keyboard of the typewriter in front of him:

"Then the buttons of the general-purpose typewriter will be heavier again......"

Qi Yanhuai smiled and said:

"Anyway, we have to make a thirty-two grid, and that one must be the heaviest, so let's try it with plastic."

Qi Yanhuai borrowed the typewriter again and replaced the aluminum alloy lettering on the drum with synthetic resin:

"The specific gravity of plastic is only less than 60% of that of aluminum alloy.

"Growing the length from sixteen to twenty-four is not heavier than aluminum.

"Uncle Zong, let's try it again and see how it works......

Huang Yue came to press the button again, experienced the effect of typing, and said with satisfaction this time:

"Yes, this weight will definitely be usable, let's hurry up and make the finished product, Your Majesty will wait and see."

Qi Yanhuai agreed, took the Chinese character code of the Ministry of Rites, and went to the factory again to prepare a new character mold.

The typewriter did not need to be redone, and for the sake of ease of testing, the typewriter was originally made according to the width that could fit thirty-two squares.

According to the original plan, the sixteen-grid typewriter that was introduced to the market was completely reduced.

Now change the design, just change the reduction from half to a third.

The typewriter was still handed over to a few young craftsmen to take turns typing, looking for possible glitches.

The actual purpose of this process is similar to finding bugs.

It will be shown to the emperor later, and it is better not to show it when it is a problem.

It is necessary to find out the possible problems in advance as much as possible and solve them.

The production of plastic products is usually an injection molding process, and the name of plastic also comes from this, the material that can be molded.

The injection molding starts with a metal mold, which engraves more than 8,000 Chinese characters, and then injects the melted plastic material and waits for it to cool and set.

In this era, there are no CNC machine tools, and making metal molds is a big project, and the resources consumed are huge.

Therefore, before the typewriter was completely finalized, both the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Rites decided not to make a formal typeface mold.

Instead, the 64 resin rods were directly distributed to the 64 lettering craftsmen, and a set was carved out for trial in the form of a carved plate.

There are more than 8,000 Chinese characters in total, and each craftsman engraves 50 characters every day, and it is absolutely finished in three days.

Four days later, Qi Yanhuai returned to the Ministry of Engineering with plastic lettering, and put them back on the prototype typewriter that had been knocked more than 100,000 times.

Under the watchful eyes of a group of craftsmen, Qi Yanhuai sat down in front of the typewriter and adjusted the state of the machine.

Then I picked up the coding sheet made by the Ministry of Rites and manually rummaged through a few words.

Theoretically, after learning the coding logic, you can look at the Chinese characters and code them yourself, and you don't have to look up the table.

But Qi Yanhuai has never learned, even if he is a designer and coder, he has never practiced at all, and this world in Shanghai has never done this.

Therefore, the process of Qi Yanhuai's tapping is called a slow, intermittent, yard, yard slow tapping.

Pap, papa, papa, papa, I waited for a long time to finish the four Chinese characters:

"Da-Ming-An-Kang".