[2] John Mallon had a major influence on the French school of paleography, introducing and demonstrating the importance of the ductus as dynamic element of the evolution of writings.
In the early years of his work, from 1937 to 1939, he retained the traditional theory that wanted all Roman writings were from the capital calligraphy by a regularly continuous transformation processing thereof, but highlighted the problems that this theory raised.
He innovated by creating the first palaeographic movie, La lettre, which highlighted the role of successive actions of cursiveness and calligraphy on the morphological transformation of the alphabet.
After the war, Mallon was the project manager of the "nouvelle paléographie" (new paleography) and published in 1952 the work Paléographie romaine, which organized new concepts of the evolution of writing in a consistent and flawless presentation: the inclination of the support moves the thick and thin strokes and generates a genealogy of various scriptures attested in Roman times that can no longer be seen as a continuous multiple affiliations, but in a pattern that, in outline, must be at least bifurcated.
"[3] Because of his originality and his work covering epigraphy, diplomatics, papyrology and codicology, he was considered "the pioneer of the French new school of palaeography".