Because I grew up in a remote part of the U.S. founded next to a river populated with lots of skilled labor, Fort Smith, Arkansas was center for printing and, at one time, printed tickets for most of the sporting and other entertainment events in the country. The company; Weldon, Williams and Lick; still says it's still the leader in printing tickets for events.
So, the high school I attended was fitted out with a printing plant. There were two Linotype machines and a large platen press. This meant that those of us who worked for the school newspaper labored cheek and jowl with our friends in the print shop and this was a great education on rigorous newspaper layout and design. When one is working with slugs of lead type locked up in a chase, precision is paramount.
Bethatasitmay, all of the above is a simple preamble to the point, Louis Moyroud, one of the two people responsible for inventing what we came to call "cold type" has passed away at the age of 96. Here's an extract from the obituary in today's NYTimes:
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 — electronics engineers and colleagues at a subsidiary of ITT (formerly International Telephone & Telegraph) in Lyon, France — 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 — and in later variations the Lumitype and the Photon — 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. [more]
