The Notre Dame Grad Who Invented the Teleprompter

Did you know a Notre Dame grad invented the teleprompter?

It’s true. Hubert “Hub” Schlafly – who earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Notre Dame in 1941 – invented the teleprompter in an effort to help a soap opera actor remember his lines.

In the early days of television, many programs were performed and broadcast “live.” Stage actors trying to make the transition to the new medium of television had to memorize new lines on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. Cue cards held by stagehands were initially used to prompt actors who had forgotten their lines, but this system had its drawbacks – especially if a clumsy stagehand dropped a cue card or showed them out of order!

An actor named Fred Barton, Jr., a Broadway theater veteran who was challenged by the demands of live television, approached Irving Kahn, a vice president at Twentieth Century-Fox studios, with the idea of putting some form of cue cards in a moving scroll, so he could rely on prompts with less risk of an on-screen blunder.

Kahn turned to a young Notre Dame graduate, Hub Schlafly, then a broadcast engineer and the Director of Television Research for Twentieth Century-Fox, and asked if such a device might be possible. Schlafly reportedly told Kahn it would “be a piece of cake.”

Schlafly used half of a suitcase as an outer shell for his new device, and rigged up a series of belts, pulleys and a motor to turn a scroll of butcher paper that displayed an actor’s lines in half-inch letters. The paper was turned gradually, controlled by a stagehand using a hand-crank, while the words were read.

On April 21, 1949, Schlafly 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 stage actors, he called his device the TelePrompTer.

Seeing potential for the new technology, Schlafly, Barton and Kahn presented the idea of developing and marketing the device to Twentieth Century-Fox, but the company declined. So, they quit their jobs and founded their own company: the TelePrompTer Corporation.

At first, the teleprompter was used as first intended, for live televised entertainment. The company sold its first teleprompter to CBS, which put it to work helping actors on the network’s first daytime soap opera – The First Hundred Years – sponsored by Procter & Gamble.

And then, the teleprompter took its place on a far bigger stage.

One day in 1952, after reading that an aging former President Herbert Hoover was having trouble reading his speeches while campaigning for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kahn traveled to Chicago, the host city for the 1952 Republican National Convention, and persuaded Hoover and other speakers to give the teleprompter a try. Not only did the Republicans like “Ike” – they liked the teleprompter. The technology was an immediate success with the Republicans in early July and with the Democrats a few weeks later. Between the Republican Convention and the Democratic Convention (held the same month in the same city), 47 of the 58 major speeches were delivered using teleprompters. For the sake of history, let’s note Hoover was the first politician to use it, when he delivered the keynote address at the Republican Convention.

In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower became the first President of the United States to use a teleprompter, when he delivered the State of the Union address. Eisenhower also began the custom of televised addresses to the American people from the White House and the Oval Office using a teleprompter.

Schlafly’s story didn’t end there. He became a pioneer of satellite technology and cable television. Schlafly and Sidney Topol, who worked for Scientific Atlanta, devised a transportable satellite earth station -- the forerunner of today's satellite dishes -- that established satellite-delivered television for the cable industry. He transformed the industry when he executed the first satellite transmission of a cable program from Washington, D.C., to a convention of 3,000 cable operators in Anaheim, California. It was the first time a satellite was used to transmit cable programming and allowed one to go up to satellites from anywhere and transmit everywhere.

Schlafly considered his greatest contribution to be a 26-foot transportable satellite dish. To show its potential, Schlafly engineered one of the first satellite broadcasts, the famous Home Box Office Inc. (HBO) "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali on October 1, 1975. He also developed the first “Pay-Per-View” system that permitted subscribers to order special programs delivered by coaxial cable.

The electrical engineer from Notre Dame was awarded two Emmys for his pioneering contributions to television: one for the teleprompter and another for his outstanding engineering achievements for cable television technology.