Comment by meatsock

part of the development of the IFB, the earpiece in common use on every tv news show: The turboencabulator skit was originally intended to demonstrate the usefulness of earpiece radios as a replacement for cue cards when actors are delivering lines for a video. Bud Haggart wanted to show that you could use the earpiece effectively even when the lines get ridiculously difficult to follow, so he used the turboencabulator as a subject because it'd been a running gag in the engineering community ever since its first technical description was published by John Hellins Quick in 1944.