Phototypesetting

For five centuries, setting type meant casting metal. Johannes Gutenberg's movable type gave way to the Linotype machine's automated slugs, but the fundamental principle remained: text was composed from physical pieces of lead alloy, heated, formed, and cooled into lines. Phototypesetting eliminated the metal entirely—and in doing so, opened the adjacent possible for digital publishing.

The conditions aligned in postwar France. René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud, electrical engineers at an ITT subsidiary in Lyon, invented the Lumitype in 1946. Their insight was that offset lithography—which had already gained wide acceptance for printing—needed photographic plates, not metal type. If you could project letter images directly onto photographic paper or film, you could skip the molten metal, the heavy machinery, and the toxic fumes entirely.

Finding little interest in France, Higonnet and Moyroud emigrated to the United States, where the American corporation Lithomat backed development. In 1949, they presented their prototype—renamed the Lumitype Photon—in New York. The Graphic Arts Research Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was formed that same year specifically to commercialize the technology.

The machine worked by spinning a disk containing character images past a high-intensity light source. A lens system projected each character onto photosensitive paper, which was then developed chemically. Compared to Linotype, which produced over 700 pounds of metal slugs per week, phototypesetting produced only paper and film. Offices without industrial ventilation could now typeset.

The technology triggered a succession event in the printing industry's ecosystem. Hot metal typesetting had dominated from 1886 to 1976—ninety years of path dependence during which Linotype and Monotype machines defined how text was produced. Phototypesetting compressed its own era into just forty years, from 1950 to 1990, before digital typesetting displaced it in turn.

By the mid-1970s, virtually the entire newspaper industry had migrated away from hot metal. The transition was not gradual; it was a punctuated equilibrium. Newspapers that had operated the same Linotype machines for decades replaced them within a few years. The skills of hot metal compositors—accumulated over generations—became obsolete almost overnight.

The cascade from phototypesetting led directly to desktop publishing. Once type existed as photographic images rather than physical objects, it became conceivable to store letter forms digitally. Early cathode-ray-tube typesetters of the 1970s pointed toward the PostScript revolution of the 1980s. When Adobe released PostScript in 1985, it completed the transition that Higonnet and Moyroud had begun: type was now pure information, reproducible infinitely without physical substrate.

The first Lumitype machines were built in America, but manufacturing returned to France in the 1950s, equipping French printing houses from 1958 onward. This transatlantic migration—invention in Lyon, development in Massachusetts, manufacturing returning to France—illustrates how the adjacent possible respects no national boundaries. The technology emerged where conditions aligned, regardless of geography.