René Alphonse Higonnet

Rene Alphonse Higonnet was born in Valence, Drôme in southeastern France on April 5, 1902, and attended the Lycée de Tournon and the Electrical Engineering School of the University of Grenoble.

[1] He developed a strong love for the United States while he was a student there, admiring the fact that it "had no national police force, no military draft, and hardly any income taxes" at the time, as his son would later recall.

The two thought that the process of printing one copy from lead type and then photographing it "insane" and sought alternative methods that would make a negative directly.

[1][3] They moved to the United States, where the Graphic Arts Research Foundation was created to foster further development of their photocomposing method, which was patented in the U.S. in 1957.

[5] Vannevar Bush called the process "a milestone in the graphic arts"[5] In 1954, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts became the first newspaper to adopt the method for all of their printing.