What is a teleprompter, and how does it work?

A teleprompter shows your script on a screen at the camera, so you can read it while you look into the lens. The viewer sees you talking to them, and the words stay out of the shot. On a stage, the same device lets a speaker read a speech while facing the audience.

How a sheet of glass hides the words

A studio teleprompter sits on the front of the camera. The script runs on a monitor under the lens, and an angled sheet of glass reflects it towards you while the camera films through the glass from behind. The monitor shows the text mirrored, so the reflection reads the right way round. The guide to using one explains the glass in more detail, along with how far back to stand and which line to read.

The kinds of teleprompter

Prompter People, a company that makes them, divides teleprompters into two basic types: those mounted on a camera and those for speeches. Smaller rigs and apps make up the rest.

• A camera teleprompter puts the glass in front of the lens, as above. It is built for television, where the presenter has to look into the lens.
• With a speech teleprompter, the speaker stands on one side of the glass and the audience on the other. The best-known version is a pair of thin, angled glass panes at either side of a podium, each reflecting the text to the speaker. Turning from one pane to the other keeps the speaker’s eyes on the crowd.
• Tablet and phone rigs use the same hood and glass, smaller, with a tablet or a phone in place of the monitor. The DIY guide shows how to build one for a phone.
• Apps use no glass at all. The script runs on the screen of the phone, tablet or computer you record with, and the closer it sits under the camera, the less your eyes leave the lens.

Who moves the text

The words have to move as you read, and there are four ways to do it. An operator can scroll them while watching you. You can drive them yourself with a foot pedal or a hand controller. They can run at a fixed speed you set before the take, which the speed guide helps you find. Or software can listen and move them to the words you say, which lets the text wait when you pause.

Where it came from

The first teleprompter was a roll of butcher paper inside half a suitcase. Smithsonian magazine’s history dates it to 1948, when the actor Fred Barton Jr. had new lines to learn every week, and sometimes every day, for live television. Irving Kahn, a vice president at 20th Century Fox, brought in the engineer Hubert Schlafly, who built a motorised paper scroll that a stagehand controlled as the actor read. Schlafly called it the TelePrompTer, after the theatre prompters who feed actors their forgotten lines, and the three men left Fox to found the TelePrompTer Corporation.

It was first used in a live production on 4 December 1950, in the CBS soap The First Hundred Years. The device sat beside the camera, so the actors’ eyes were slightly off the lens, and viewers could tell. A later design patented by Jess Oppenheimer, the producer of I Love Lucy, used mirrors and glass to put the script in front of the lens. As other makers built their own, the company’s name became the word for every device of the kind.

Where Wispim fits

Wispim is an app of the last kind. On an iPhone it has three ways of moving the script: Voice follows the words you say and stops when you stop, Sound scrolls at the speed you set while it hears you, in any language, and Constant keeps a fixed speed. The script can sit in a floating window over Camera, Instagram or TikTok while they record. Wispim also runs on an iPad, on a Mac and, as Wispim for Windows, on a Windows PC. At any computer, the online teleprompter on this site runs the same three modes in a browser.

Questions

What does the word teleprompter mean?

It means a screen that shows a speaker their words while they look at a camera or an audience. The word began as TelePrompTer, the name Hubert Schlafly gave his 1948 machine after the theatre prompters who feed actors their lines. It became the common word as other companies made the same device.

Is a teleprompter the same as an Autocue?

Yes. The Cambridge Dictionary lists Autocue as a British trademark and gives teleprompter as the American word for the same device: a screen that lets someone on television read their words while looking into the camera.

What did presenters read from before teleprompters?

Paper. In Smithsonian magazine’s history, news anchors held printed scripts, and actors who could not learn their lines in time used cue cards flipped by stagehands, which could hold up a live show.

When did politicians start using teleprompters?

At the 1952 party conventions in the United States, where 47 of the 58 major speeches were read from one, according to Smithsonian magazine. Eisenhower first used one for a State of the Union address in 1954, and the pair of glass panes beside the podium arrived in the 1960s.