Irving B. Kahn

Irving Berlin Kahn (c.1917–1994) was an American media proprietor. He was the founder of TelePrompTer Corporation and Cable TV.

Irving Berlin Kahn was born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey. He was the nephew of his namesake, popular composer Irving Berlin, and graduated from the University of Alabama, where he was a drum major.

Kahn's first job was as a public relations agent for Twentieth Century-Fox where he pioneered radio advertising for movies. After serving as a lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, he returned to his job and by 1950 was the vice president in charge of Fox's new radio and television subsidiary, TCF Television Productions, Inc..

With colleagues from Fox Radio, Fred Barton, Jr., a Broadway theatre actor, and Hubert Schlafly, an electrical engineer, he founded TelePrompTer Corporation which, in the 1950s, invented the teleprompter, which scrolls text to on-camera talent, in order to help a soap opera actor who could not remember his lines. Hubert Schlafly unveiled the teleprompter on the set of the CBS soap opera, The First Hundred Years, in 1950. PR men handled the teleprompters. Schlafly invented the idea of actors in soap operas reading their lines by prompters, not scripts as they had been.

TelePrompTer itself sold its eponymous business in the 1960s and invested in cable and satellite broadcast services.

Kahn was a visionary who had optimistically predicted in the 1960s that cable would provide 85 percent of all television reception by the end of the 1970s.

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