Hubert Schlafly

Hubert Schlafly, who died on April 20 aged 91, was one of a three-man team that invented the teleprompter, the device which lets actors, politicians, presenters and newsreaders read television scripts while looking at the camera. 

Hubert Schlafly with his two Emmy awards Photo: AP

 

In the late 1940s Schlafly and his two colleagues came up with an early crude contraption that later, with various refinements, became a standard feature in television studios worldwide.

As well as Schlafly, the inventive trio comprised Irving Kahn (a nephew of the songwriter Irving Berlin) and Schlafly’s friend Fred Barton, an actor, who first floated the idea.

Their early teleprompter, mounted inside a suitcase and controlled by someone cranking a handle, caused a motorised scroll of paper to move so that performers in a television soap opera could read their lines from it.

Presenters and announcers could also use it, appearing to be looking straight into the camera lens in the “manly, unaffected fashion” (as the British television critic Peter Black put it) “of a man about to try to borrow a fiver”.

Schlafly was an electrical engineer who made the apparatus work. He was director of television research for 20th Century Fox in 1948 when Barton asked Kahn, as Fox’s vice-president of radio and television, if he could come up with something that would enable actors in soap operas to remember their lines. Kahn turned to Schlafly, who declared it was “a piece of cake”. When Fox declined to invest in their device, the three men started their own company, the TelePrompTer Corporation, and sold their first production model to CBS in 1950.

But their breakthrough came two years later, when the former American President Herbert Hoover delivered the keynote speech to the Republican National Convention in Chicago — the first occasion on which a politician had relied on a teleprompter. When Hoover ad-libbed several sentences, the teleprompter paused. Ordering the machine to restart, Hoover made viewers across the United States take note of the new invention.
Hubert Joseph Schlafly Jr was born on August 14 1919 in St Louis. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1941 he worked for General Electric and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology radiation laboratory. He joined 20th Century Fox in 1947.
Schlafly’s teleprompter was slow to arrive in Britain. It was only in 1954 that the BBC’s superintendent engineer inquired if anyone would be interested in trying such a device “should one become available”.
When Peter Dimmock used it for the first time on Sportsview that April, the watching Peter Black mocked it as “a complicated device about the size of a small sitting-room which Dimmock did not so much use as enter”. In the entertainment sphere it was first used on a Ted Ray comedy series.
Schlafly was president of the TelePrompTer Corporation until 1972. His original suitcase unit was soon replaced by glass panels and eventually superimposed words in front of cameras. Later refinements included a podium with concealed prompting devices, plumbing for drinking water and a platform to lift or lower a speaker.
His TelePrompTer company branched out into the cable television business, and Schlafly developed the first pay system for subscribers to order programmes delivered by cable. But the firm later became entangled in legal problems, and Schlafly left after Kahn was convicted in 1971 of bribing government officials.
He received two Emmy awards, and in 2008 he was inducted into the Cable Television Hall of Fame, in his acceptance speech using a teleprompter himself for the first time.
Hubert Schlafly’s wife of 59 years, Leona Martin, died in 2003.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/technology-obituaries/8481670/Hubert-Schlafly.html