Louis Moyroud papers

Louis Marius Moyroud was born on February 16, 1914 in Moirans, Isere, France to Marius Gustave Moyroud and Anne Marie Louise Viat. He attended engineering school from 1929 to 1936, graduating as an engineer from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Metiers. From 1936 to 1940 he served in the military. In 1941 he joined LMT Labratories, leaving in 1946 to continue his work on photocomposition which began in 1944 after visiting a printing plant where he witnessed the “insane” process of casting molten lead to form lines of type for just a single page which was then printed and photographed. Along with Rene Alphonse Higonnet, Moyroud developed the first phototypesetting machine, Lumitype, later called the Photon.

Moyroud traveled to America in 1948 to share the new technology that would replace 4,000 pounds of metal type with a piece of film. Their work was funded by The Graphic Arts Research Foundation Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts and resulted in a model that was the size of a stenographer’s desk and weighed about 300 pounds. An eight inch revolving disc contained eight rows of characters in concentric circles, which rotated and projected characters onto a film, allowed for flexibility in the font size, spacing, and the combinations of type. The first book to be entirely phototypeset was The Wonderful World of Insects, printed in 1953, the same year the photocomposing method was patented.

International Photon Corporation (IPC) was bought by Dymo Industries, Inc. (Dymo) in 1973 after a financial crisis. Dymo eventually was acquired by ITEK after a series of purchases. Later, Moyroud would assist with the development of the Eurocat series of phototypesetting machines brought to the European market by Bobst Graphics.

Moyroud died on June 26, 2010 in Delray Beach, Florida. He received the Franklin Medal in 1955 and the RIT Goudy Award in 1997. Both Moyroud and Higonnet were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1985.