Thousands of characters. No alphabet. How would you design a Chinese typewriter?

Imagine yourself at the dawn of telegraphy in the 1840s, trying to invent Morse Code for Chinese–or in the 1890s trying to invent a Chinese typewriter. How would you fit thousands of characters onto a machine with fewer than 50 keys? Or perhaps you are in the 1950s, trying to invent the first Chinese computer. How would you fit Chinese onto a QWERTY keyboard? Throughout the age of modern information technology (I.T.), the Chinese language has presented fascinating and irresistible puzzles for engineers, linguists, and entrepreneurs across the globe.