Chinese-American Lois Lew who had spent most of her life running a restaurant in upstate New York, had played a key role in demonstrating the feasibility of an invention once thought impossible: an electric Chinese typewriter. Lew passed away in 2023, but her story would form the basis for a crucial chapter in Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney’s @tsmullaney 2024 book, “The Chinese Computer,” which explores the global effort to digitize Chinese characters. It was a problem that drew in engineers, linguists, and entrepreneurs from around the world — but also, as Mullaney points out, ordinary men and women like Lew. Read more: