uses a teleprompter while announcing the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. The
TelePrompTer Corporation was founded in the 1950s by
Fred Barton Jr.,
Hubert Schlafly and
Irving Berlin Kahn. Barton was an
actor who suggested the concept of the teleprompter as a means of assisting television performers who had to memorize large amounts of material in a short time. Schlafly built the first teleprompter in 1950. It was simply a mechanical device, operated by a hidden technician, located near the camera. The script, in inch-high letters, was printed by a special electric typewriter on a paper scroll, which was advanced as the performer read, and the machines rented for the then-considerable sum of $30 per hour. The teleprompter was used for the first time on December 4, 1950, in filming the CBS soap
The First Hundred Years. It was used by
Lucille Ball and
Desi Arnaz in 1953 and was awarded U.S. patents for its creation. His system uses a mirror to reflect a script onto a piece of glass placed in front of the camera lens, thus allowing the reader to look directly into the camera. The producers of
Dragnet estimated the use of teleprompters cut the show's production time by as much as 50%
Arthur Godfrey,
Raymond Massey,
Cedric Hardwicke, and
Helen Hayes were early users of the technology. to address the
1952 Republican National Convention in
Chicago. U.S. Governor
Paul A. Dever spoke at the
1952 Democratic National Convention, also held in Chicago, using a mechanical-roll teleprompter on a long pole held by a TV technician in the convention audience, while the 1952 Republican National Convention used a smaller teleprompter placed in front of the speaker's rostrum. in 1955,
Richard L. Neuberger, a Democratic Senator from Oregon, proposed legislation that if a politician used a teleprompter the use of the device had to be noted in the speech. used teleprompters extensively in their filmed made for television programs. The new technology saw quick adoption in the
sponsored film industry where cutting production costs made the difference between a film that made money and one that lost money.
Cinécraft Productions was the first to advertise the availability of three-camera synchronized filming with a teleprompter when in 1954 they began to advertise their use of the new technology in
Business Screen, a magazine dedicated to the sponsored film industry. Cinécraft used the technique to film the 1953–1960 weekly television series
The Ohio Story. Cinécraft also used the technique for executive
desk talks in the 1950s and 1960s. On January 4, 1954,
Dwight Eisenhower was the first President to use a teleprompter for a State of the Union address. The first
personal computer-based teleprompter, CompuPrompt, appeared in 1982. It was invented and marketed by Courtney M. Goodin and Laurence B. Abrams in Los Angeles, California. The custom software and specially-redesigned camera hardware ran on the
Atari 800 computer, which featured smooth hardware-assisted scrolling. Their company later became ProPrompt, Inc., still in business . Paper-based teleprompting companies Electronic Script Prompting, QTV, and Telescript followed suit and developed their own software several years later when computers powerful enough to scroll text smoothly became available. In January 2010 Compu=Prompt received a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for "Pioneering Development in Electronic Prompting". ==Etymology==