A couple found the lost Chinese typewriter everyone thought vanished

Jennifer Felix and her husband Nelson pulled a strange 50-pound machine from an Arizona storage unit, part of her late father's belongings. It looked roughly like a typewriter, but the keyboard was covered in characters neither of them recognized. "This isn't just a typewriter. These are not English symbols," Jennifer told Stanford Magazine. Nelson posted photos to a Facebook group called "What's My Typewriter Worth?" and the couple went out to dinner. By the time they checked again, people worldwide were trying to reach them. Some wanted to buy it. Others begged them not to sell. The machine was the MingKwai, the only prototype of an experimental Chinese typewriter built by author Lin Yutang in the 1940s, long considered lost. Its 72 keys let a typist search thousands of characters through a small window Lin called the "Magic Eye," the same basic idea behind typing Chinese on a phone today. It now sits at Stanford, and researchers ran it through a medical CT scanner rather than risk taking it apart. They are building a replica, which would be the second ever made.