InventorsPhototypesetting
Phototypesetting Machines
Two Frenchmen, Rene Alphonse
Higonnet and Louis Marius Moyroud,
developed a successful phototypesetter that used a strobe light and a series
of optics to project characters from a spinning disk onto photographic paper.
According to Britannica Encyclopedia*, "the first
mechanical phototypesetters involved the adaptation of existing typesetters by
replacing the metal matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters and
replacing the caster with a photographic unit. The industrial application of
this idea resulted in the Fotosetter (1947), a phototypesetter... The first revolutionary application
of this notion was the Lumitype, invented as the Lithomat in 1949 by two
Frenchmen, René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud. Executed by phototypesetting,
The Marvelous World of Insects was done on their machine in 1953. The first
model had an attached keyboard. Later models with a separate keyboard printed
more than 28,000 characters per hour... ...a
third generation of phototypesetters appeared in the 1960s, in which all
mechanical moving parts were eliminated by omitting the use of light and
therefore omitting the moving optical device responsible for operating in its
field."
Louis Marius Moyroud and Rene Alphonse
Higonnet developed the first practical phototypesetting machine.
Phototypesetting Using phototypesetting, a direct
image of the text is obtained, positive or negative, according to need,
on a photosensitive, usually transparent surface by exposing the surface
to light through transparent matrices, negative or positive, of the letters
and symbols.
Related Information Printing History of printing, first documents,
modern day printing.