Teleprompter

From presidential elections to local live television the teleprompter has been used as the virtual note cards to feed lines to those who chose to speak on television.

The teleprompter conveys the idea that the talent has memorized their speech and gives the viewer the sense that the person on camera has vast knowledge of the subject they are speaking on. The teleprompter also allows the speaker to connect with the audience by looking them, what seems like, directly in the eye. Have you ever noticed when watching the news that the news anchor is practically looking at you without breaking eye contact? This is because the teleprompter is reflected onto a glass which is placed right in front of the camera.

The script, which is mostly written up by the anchor, is loaded onto a monitor backwards. the monitor is them mounted onto the camera at an angle that allows the anchor to read the reflection off of the highly reflective glass which is placed right in front of the camera.

The device started out in 1948 as a roll of butcher paper rigged up inside half of a suitcase. Actor Fred Barton Jr., a Broadway veteran, was nervous for those that had been either in theater or the movies, the transition to television was difficult, because there was a much greater need for memorizing lines. Instead of memorizing the same batch of lines over the course of months, Barton was now expected to memorize new lines on a weekly or even daily basis. Cue cards were sometimes used, but relying on unsteady stagehands to flip between them could sometimes cause catastrophic delays.

On April 21, 1949, Schlalfly submitted a patent application for his “television prompting apparatus,” and in the tradition of offstage “prompters” who had been relied upon to feed forgotten lines to actors, he called his device the TelePrompTer. At first, the machine was used for its intended purpose: televised entertainment. It was part of a live production for the first time on December 4, 1950, as actors in the CBS soap “The First Hundred Years” read their lines off a device mounted to the side of the camera. Now a telepropmter is a must have in the studio world both for live and taped TV.