HIGONNET, René Alphonse (1902 - 1983)

René Alphonse Higonnet was a French-born engineer and inventor who co-developed the phototypesetting process with Louis Moyroud.

Higonnet was born in Valence, Drome, France in 1902. The son of a teacher, he was educated at the Lycée de Tournon and the Electrical Engineering School of Grenoble University. He was granted a scholarship by the International Institute of Education in New York in 1922, went to Carleton College in Minnesota for one year, and subsequently spent one term at the Harvard Engineering School. He was an engineer with the Materiel Téléphonique, a French subsidiary of ITT, from 1924 to 1948. He then became a transmission engineer and worked on long distance cables in Paris-Strasbourg, London-Brussels, and Vienna-Budapest. He was also associated with the Patent and Information Department of ITT. Louis Marius Moyroud and Rene Alphonse Higonnet developed the first practical phototype setting machine. Moyroud and Higonnet first demonstrated their first phototypesetting machine, the Lumitype-later known as the Photon-in September 1946 and introduced it to America in 1948. The Photon was further refined under the direction of the Graphic Arts Research Foundations.

variant spelling:
HIGONNET, René Alphonse

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