Lumitype

Lumitype (later: Photon ) is the name of a photo typesetting machine for automatic typesetting .

The "Lumitype" was invented by the telecommunications engineers René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud and developed in New York and Paris between 1949 and 1956. In the USA it was given the different name "Photon", which was later used exclusively.

It consisted of a keyboard for input, also known as a button, which generated a control tape and plain text. The perforated tape was used to store text and control commands for the exposure station, similar to the punch card . The current line could be saved in a relay memory. Corrections could be made in this way and the machine could automatically exclude the line after pressing the end-of-line key. Alternatively, the “ TTS ” quick setting process could be used to enter data and control the exposure unit. In the exposure unit there was a rotating writing disk as a matrix carrier. The machine could set 30,000 characters per hour.

literature

• Sepp Dußler, Fritz Kolling: Modern typesetting . 4th edition. Verlag Documentation Saur KG, Pullach 1974, ISBN 3-7940-8703-8 .