was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

inventor who developed the first practical Japanese typewriter. He received the Blue Ribbon Award and the Small Asahi Ribbon. Out of the thousands of

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

characters, Sugimoto's typewriter used 2,400 of them.

Biography

Kyota Sugimoto was born in Okayama Prefecture in 1882. He completed his studies at the Training Institute for Communication Technology in

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of ...

in 1900.

Typewriters A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively ...

were already in common use for English and other languages with small alphabets, but available typewriters for

could only type a few of the thousands of characters. Sugimoto studied the frequency of use of kanji characters, and selected 2,400 of them for a typewriter. The characters were arranged in a grid, with a typebar that could move over the grid in two dimensions to select a particular character. The typebar then struck the character against the paper, and returned it to the grid. The paper was held against a

platen A platen (or platten) is a flat platform with a variety of roles in printing or manufacturing. It can be a flat metal (or earlier, wooden) plate pressed against a medium (such as paper) to cause an impression in letterpress printing. Platen m ...

, similar to existing typewriters. He obtained the patent rights to the Japanese typewriter that he invented, first in Japan (1915, Patent N° 27877 ) and somewhat later in the USA (1917, Patent N° 1245633 ). In 1953 he was decorated with the Blue Ribbon Award, and in 1965 he received the Small Asahi Ribbon Award. He died in 1972. On April 18, 1985, the Japan Patent Office selected him as one of

Ten Japanese Great Inventors The system of industrial rights in Japan celebrated 100 years of its existence in 1985. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Japanese system of industrial property rights, the Japan Patent Office selected ten great inventors wh ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sugimoto, Kyota 1882 births 1972 deaths 20th-century Japanese inventors Typewriters Kanji