The Ultimate Assistant to the President

In the midst of the Osama bin Laden news last week occurred one of those quiet cultural transitions that catch The Scrapbook’s attention. We are speaking of the death, in Stamford, Connecticut, of 91-year-old Hubert J. Schlafly Jr.

The president, with teleprompter

AP / Gerald Herbert

Mr. Schlafly, who so far as The Scrapbook is aware was not closely related to Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum fame, was the onetime “director of television research” at 20th Century Fox. One day, in the late 1940s, he received a request from the vice president for radio and television at Fox, Irving Kahn. Kahn had been talking to a Broadway actor named Fred Barton, who told him that he had an idea for a mechanical device that could help him remember his lines. Could Hub Schlafly build the contraption conceived by Fred Barton?

“I said it was a piece of cake,” Schlafly told the Stamford Advocate a few years ago. He attached a motorized scroll inside a suitcase shell, printed half-inch letters on the scroll, and set the device beside some television cameras. The teleprompter was born.

Schlafly, Kahn, and Barton must have instantly realized they’d hit the jackpot, for all three quit their jobs and founded the TelePrompTer Corp., which revolutionized not only television production—it was first used on a soap opera in 1950—but also politics as well. Former President Herbert Hoover was the first prominent politician to use a teleprompter, in a speech at the 1952 Republican national convention, and Lyndon Johnson was the first president to use a teleprompter routinely in public appearances.