Few people can legitimately claim to have revolutionised anything, but Moyroud and Higonnet certainly did, their phototypesetter eventually consigning the hot metal device of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype and a 500 year direct lineage back to Gutenberg to the scrapheap, and paving the way for the digitisation of the print industry.

Just after the war in 1946, together with Higonnet who passed away 25 years ago, Moyroud visited a printing plant in his native France, where the pair witnessed the hot lead typesetting process, a scene Moyroud described as ‘insane’. Moyroud and Higonnet then began collecting typewriters, electronic relays and photographic discs to pursue an electronic typesetting future.

Although they were able to demonstrate a prototype later that same year it took another decade and a move to the USA to see the phototypesetter become a commercial reality. Known as the Lumitype and  later the Photon, initial costs were prohibitive, but before long had come down to the point where it became commercially viable.

Prior to that the first book printed by their photo-composing machine was published in 1953 as a test for MIT Press. Titled The Wonderful World of Insects, it contained 292 pages of text dotted with 46 black-and-white photographs, among them images of a scarab beetle, a North American giant dragonfly and a roundheaded apple-tree borer. The next year The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, became the first newspaper to abandon its melting pot and adopt the new process.

Moyroud and Higonnet were both inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1985 in recognition of their vision and achievement.

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