Zhou Houkun

Zhou Houkun (Chinese: 周厚坤, c. 1890 – after 1959), also written Chow Hou-kun, was a Chinese engineer and inventor best known for his Chinese typewriter design. Born in Wuxi, China, Zhou was selected for the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship and arrived in the United States in 1910. There, he attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying a range of engineering fields. At MIT, he assisted in the development of the wind tunnel and researched the use of bamboo to reinforce concrete.

While studying at MIT, Zhou developed a prototype for a Chinese typewriter, which could produce 4,000 common Chinese characters. His prototype received international attention and was featured in The New York Times and Popular Science. He returned to China in an effort to mass-produce the typewriter alongside the Commercial Press; due to poor production quality, Zhou never saw the mass production of his design. After his contract with Commercial Press ended, he worked as an engineer for various Chinese companies, as the chief editor of the Journal of The Chinese Engineering Society, and as the vice president of Shanghai Industrial Junior College, which he cofounded in 1940. He fled from China during its communist revolution and retired in the United States.