Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. I’m here at the Museum of Printing to talk about the first photographic typesetting machine. As you read in WhatTheyThink a week or so ago, beginning of July, Louis Moyroud the coinventor of photographic typesetting died at the age of 96. Louis and his partner Rene Higonet came up with the idea of photographic typesetting around 1945 in France. Rene came to the United States right after that, made contact with Vannevar Bush who was at that time the President of MIT.
Bush put Higonet in contact with Bill Garth who had a little company called Lithomath that made offset masters. You typed on them and then you could put them on an offset press as a plate. Garth saw that the potential in photographic typesetting, realizing that offset lithography was coming in, but realizing they didn’t have enough money to make it happen. So he formed a foundation. Now there’s a case study from Harvard that really tracked what happened at the very beginning because it’s an interesting story.
The machine that Garth wanted was going to be a small machine that could sell at a low price but the Board of Directors of the foundation that was founded to support the development of the machine was made-up of the biggest printers, the biggest newspapers, the biggest typesetting services. And they decided that they wanted a machine that was bigger in every way, had more fonts, more sizes, more of everything. And so it took several more years before they were able to get a machine to market so the machine was ready in 1949. When the first machine set the book called, The Wonderful World of Insects from Beacon Press, the first book set was photographic typesetting.
But it was not until ’54 that you started to see the first photographic typesetting machine introduced. Now the principle is very simple. Well, simple now. You had a glass disk with all the characters around it and opposite each of the letters, rows of letters you had these timing marks. And a device counted the timing marks and knew where a letter was, and then flashed a xenon lamp through it and created on the other side what would be a positive.
Now, it went through a set of lenses in order to make the image bigger or smaller and then the result was photographic film. It was a film positive. Now, what everybody really wanted was film negative. That would get you closer to a printing plate. They would take the film positive and contact it against other film in order to get the negative that they wanted but as time went on they just stopped doing that. They went to photo paper and then they pasted it up on boards and shot it because as long as you have a negative on one side you’re going to get a positive on the other. You always get the opposite and this technology could not work, of course, with positives as your master images.
This was the first machine and Louis donated it and a collection of other early photographic typesetters to the Museum. There was a clutch here for your sizes and set widths, buttons for your point sizes. There was a typewriter that gives you feedback as to what you were typing. You couldn’t use cathode ray tubes in those days, they really weren’t available. You had other buttons for your functions like quad left, quad center, quad right. There’s a photo unit that’s as big as this control unit but we don’t have that on display at this stage.
The machine was not successful at the very beginning and the reason was because they made it so big. They put so much into it, it sold for over a $100,000, which in those days was big bucks. And so they sold them to the large printing companies and newspapers but really not to the mass market. It was only when Bill Garth was forced out of Photon and formed Compugraphic with Ellis Hansen that you started to see the low cost photographic typesetting machine enter the market.
Behind on us on exhibit is the ATFB8 which was the first machine to separate the functions of input and output, just like the monotype did. And that is that you had one device that produced a paper tape which you then ran through the second device that gave you your photographic typesetting. That was based on freedonjustin writer which was a typewriter device that separated the functions of input and output, and they made a phototypesetting machine that would work. But it was very limited, had lots of problems.
Later on the Photon company would produce other machines that were more successful but by then Compugraphic had made a major dent in the marketplace with low-cost machines that sold for $8,000 or less and that changed everything. Photographic typesetting really laid the groundwork for offset lithography. It was the improvement in prepress, in workflow at the prepress stage that allowed us to move offset. And within a few years letter press printing was gone, hot metal typesetting was gone, and all the things that were associated with it were gone which is why this museum exists to preserve that world.
We have the only collection of phototypesetting machines I think in the world, including the first, second, and second generation, and third generation devices. But by the way, we’ll never work these machines because the electronics and their very nature is one that’s finding a technician that could keep them running is almost impossible, whereas on the hot metal side because they’re mostly mechanical is very easy to keep them running and to find people that can handle them.
In any case if you want to see some of the earliest photographic typesetting machines and say, “My father worked on that machine,” the Museum of Printing is in North Andover, Massachusetts. Take care.
