Hubert Schlafly, one of the inventors of the original Teleprompter, died last week at the age of 91. In the late '40s or early '50s (accounts conflict), Schlafly was working as a technical expert for 20th Century Fox. During his tenure, soap opera actor Fred Barton requested lines of dialogue be printed large and hung in various locations around the set, as the pace of shooting often outpaced the actors' ability to memorize new dialogue. Barton, Schlafly and Fox manager Irving Berlin Kahn subsequently collaborated to produce the world's first Teleprompter, a hand-cranked scroll printed with dialogue that folded up into a suitcase, albeit one that weighed 40 pounds.

The Teleprompter has since evolved into the one-way glass projection device we see politicians speaking into. Schlafly got out of the business in the 1960s and soon invented the cable box. An article on Schlafly in Notre Dame Magazine (presumably his alma mater) contains his interesting take on inventions, which could easily be applied to product design:

[Schlafly's] fond of saying there are three phases to all inventions:

"One is the wild-eyed guy who has an idea, sees a need and has the technical background two address it.

"Two is finding sufficient financial backing to create something that might be marketable.

"And three is when everybody looks at it and says, 'Anybody could have done that.'"