René Alphonse Higonnet

René Alphonse Higonnet (April 5, 1902 – October 13, 1983) was a French engineer and inventor who co-developed the phototypesetting process with Louis Moyroud, which allows text and images to be printed on paper using a photoengraving process, a method that made the traditional publishing method of hot metal typesetting obsolete.

Biography

Rene Alphonse Higonnet was born in Valence, Drôme in southeastern France on April 5, 1902, and attended the Lycée de Tournon and the Electrical Engineering School of the University of Grenoble. He was awarded a scholarship by the Institute of International Education to attend Carleton College in 1922 where he spent one year and then attended the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He developed a strong love for the United States while he was a student there, admiring the fact that it "had no national police force, no military draft, and hardly any income taxes" at the time, as his son would later recall.

From 1924 to 1948, he was employed by Le Matériel Téléphonique, a French subsidiary of ITT Corporation. In the early 1940s, Moyroud and Higonnet visited a printing plant, where they saw the traditional printing process of hot metal typesetting, in which molten lead was cast to form lines of type to make the print for a newspaper or book, which was then photographed to produce a negative necessary for offset printing. The two thought that the process of printing one copy from lead type and then photographing it "insane" and sought alternative methods that would make a negative directly. They developed a device they called Lumitype (called "Photon" in the US) that used a typewriter-like input device to allow letters to be selected from a spinning disk using a strobe light and projected onto photographic paper which could then be photoengraved to make printing plates, which they first unveiled in France in September 1946.