How Teleprompter makes TV newscasters suddenly smarter

Teleprompter

A typical smart TV presenter

By Prince Osuagwu

In recent times, the TV presenter is smarter. He holds the viewer spell-bound with his antics of reading out news without looking down at the scripts. Meanwhile the impressions are that these professionals are either highly intelligent or outright super humans.
But we can reveal to you today, that the secret, is a technology called the teleprompter machine. This is a telescript devise used in the television news business that prompts the newsreader with an electronic visual text of the script.
The screen is in front of the presenter and usually below the lens of the camera. The words on the screen are reflected to a sheet of clear glass or specially prepared beam splitter. Light from the performer passes through the front side of the glass into the lens, while a shroud surrounding the lens and the back side of the glass prevents unwanted light from reflecting into the lens. The news reader on cue only needs to look in the direction of the camera lens and see words reflect on the clear glass and read them.
As the speaker does not need to look down to consult written notes, he or she appears to have memorized the speech or be speaking spontaneously. But all is the work of this piece of brilliant technology.
Genesis
The teleprompter technology is the brain child of the Teleprompter corporation founded in the 1950's by Fred Barton, Jr, Herbert 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 was printed on a paper scroll, which was advanced as the performer read. In 1952, former US President, Herbert Hoover used a Schlafly-designed teleprompter to address the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Modernisation:
Modern Teleprompters for news programmes consists of a personal computer, connected to video monitors on each camera. However, as spontaneous as this technology makes newscasters look, there has been countless series of embarrassing moments termed newsroom disasters where there have been a total collapse of the entire news bulletin from teleprompters when they suddenly fail and leave newsreaders in a blank.
However, news readers are trained to follow the prompter by flipping their scrip over at the end of every page. But sometimes, the deeply concentrating reader eventual gets carried away by the fluidity and spontaneity of the technology that they forget the words are not coming from their heads and that things could go wrong.
Incidentally, things, do very often, go wrong and the news reader is left at the mercy of split seconds precision to resume reading from the hard script before him or her. It is at this point, you know they aren’t super humans after all.