Last Updated on August 22, 2017
You wouldn’t recognize his name, nor would the very people who owe their careers (at least, in part) to him.   But  Hubert “Hub” Schlafly left a legacy that continues to have a prominent role in television today.
More than 60 years ago, Schlafly  helped develop the device known as the TelePrompTer, which projects the text of a script onto a mirror in front of a television camera lens.   Anchors and performers are then able to look directly into the lens of the camera, thereby making eye contact with their audience, and see their lines at the same time.
When I started in television, the prompter system was very old school:   script paper was taped together, page by page, with scotch tape into a long sheet, which was then fed via conveyor beneath a small black and white camera.   That camera’s image was then displayed on a monitor that was reflected in front of the lens.   Over the years, when newsrooms went from typewriters to computers, prompting systems followed, replacing those long, taped script pages with a mouse connected to a computer that would then scroll the lines in a more high-tech way.
Though more efficient, the computer method took a little fun out of the prompter process:   it was absolute chaos when a producer would kill a story in the middle of a block, forcing the prompter operator to feverishly rip script pages apart and feed them manually, one by one, beneath the camera.   There was always that fear that the next script might not be there.
Nothing like a little suspense in a live newscast.
The TelePrompTer was originally used in 1950 during a soap opera; back then, soaps were done live.   But it was quickly adopted by news programs as well.   It is said to have been conceived by a stage actor who needed help remembering his lines.
Sixty years later, it’s still helping people do just that.
