In the 1950s machines began to appear in the United States and Europe that set text in phototype, challenging the hot-metal machines that had been setting the type for books, magazines, and advertising since the late 19th century. Their production target was offset printing, which used a film image of the type to make a flat plate. Lithography. The three-dimensional metal type required for letterpress printing was no longer needed.

The phototype concept had been around for a while, but the first machine is usually identified as the Lumitype (see Wikipedia), invented in Lyon, France in the late 1940s.

But this history ignores events two decades earlier. In 1924 Nobuo Morisawa (1901–2000) and Mokichi Ishii (1887–1963), filed a patent for a phototypesetting machine that could set Japanese.

That first machine was operated by hand and set display type. It was really an astounding achievement since the language has a minimum of 2,000 glyphs—and the current standard calls for more than 20,000. But each fits in a square, unlike Latin glyphs. The two partners set up a factory and started selling the machines in 1929. Morisawa, an engineer from a working-class family, was the one who realized a Japanese phototypesetter would have the advantage of set character widths, but there were the minimum number was 20x the Latin character set at the time. He adapted the mechanics of the Nippon typewriter which had appeared in 1917, replacing the tray of metal characters with a film grid containing 2,400 glyphs. (Additional glyphs were available on a second grid.)

Tech and design

Ishii focused on the type design, and his fonts are still used and admired today. With wealthy parents, he provided the capital and the connections to get the firm started. And the designs were essential. The first company was called Ishii Phototypesetting Institute.

There was a market: Lithographers who printed art and advertising posters; agencies who used drawings and lettering for ads that were then made into photoengraved “zincs” for letterpress printing. But it would be 30 years before offset lithography challenged letterpress for big publishers.

In Japan there was even greater inertia in the technology of metal type and letterpress, due to investments in equipment, infrastructure, and labor. Somehow the new company survived through the stress of the 1930s (economic depression and war in China and Russia), but the partners split up.

WWII obliterated type inertia in Japan, and after the war Morisawa rejoined Ishii and began to work on faster typesetters, with keyboards. But the two fell apart again; in 1948 Morisawa started his own company. Ishii changed the name of the original firm to Sha-ken.