Metro Jacksonville

Another fascinating tale about an invention we take for granted:

QuoteLouis Moyroud Dies at 96; Helped Revolutionize Printing
By DENNIS HEVESI

In decades past, the words on this page would have been produced by melting lead to shape it into lines of type that would make up the newspaper’s columns â€" a process that was universal in the printing industry.

That so-called hot type process was a direct descendant of the movable type invented by Gutenberg more than 500 years ago.

A challenger to hot type appeared in 1946 when Louis Marius Moyroud and Rene Alphonse Higonnet created the first practical phototypesetting machine.

Mr. Moyroud, whose invention was the bridge to the era of digital typesetting, died Monday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 96.

Before Gutenberg, the few books that existed were hand-copied, mostly by members of religious orders. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany, in the 1450s, was the first mass-produced book in history. It was hand-set from individual metal letters pieced together â€" an arduous process that endured for four centuries.

In the 1880s, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. Its operator sat at a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter, creating lines of type that were formed from lead bubbling in a melting pot at more than 500 degrees. Columns of type, called galleys, would be loaded into a heavy metal frame, called a chase. The chase was then pressed against a thick paper mold, from which a curved metal printing plate was cast and, finally, placed on the press.

It was a cumbersome and costly process.

Then, in the early 1940s, Mr. Moyroud and Mr. Higonnet â€" electronics engineers and colleagues at a subsidiary of ITT (formerly International Telephone & Telegraph) in Lyon, France â€" visited a nearby printing plant and witnessed the Linotype operation.

“My dad always said they thought it was insane,” Patrick Moyroud (pronounced MOY-rood) said. “They saw the possibility of making the process electronic, replacing the metal with photography. So they started cobbling together typewriters, electronic relays, a photographic disc.”

The result, called a photo-composing machine â€" and in later variations the Lumitype and the Photon â€" used a strobe light and a series of lenses to project characters from a spinning disc onto photographic paper, which was pasted onto pages, then photoengraved on plates for printing.

Mr. Moyroud and Mr. Higonnet first demonstrated the device in France in 1946 and then moved to the United States, where the Graphic Arts Research Foundation established a corporation so they could further develop and market their invention. It was patented in 1957 and eventually became the industry standard.

“Their work definitely revolutionized the printing industry,” said Rini Paiva, the director of research at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Va., into which Mr. Moyroud and Mr. Higonnet were inducted in 1985 (two years after Mr. Higonnet had died).

“The process was much faster, much easier for the operator,” Ms. Paiva continued, “and once the high cost of the initial machines came down there was a major reduction in the cost of printing as it became more efficient.”

Born in Moirans, France, on Feb. 16, 1914, Louis Marius Moyroud was the only child of Marius and Anne-Marie Vial Moyroud. His father died when he was a baby; his mother worked in a textile factory.

Louis excelled in school and received government financial support to study at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers, one of France’s premier engineering institutions. He graduated in 1936 and, after serving in the French military, joined the ITT subsidiary in Lyon.

Mr. Moyroud married Marie-Therese Meynet in 1941; she died in 2008. He is survived by three sons, Patrick, Richard and Christian.

The first book printed by a photo-composing machine was published in 1953. 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.

A year later, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., became the first newspaper to abandon its melting pot and adopt the new process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/media/02moyroud.html?hpw

This is interesting to me , since my occupation has always been the Printing and Graphic Arts Industry...which is ever-changing .  A very interesting piece! I remember seeing an antique Linotype Machine at the Jacksonville Children's Museum.... now MOSH.   I wonder what ever became of that machine ?