Secret history of classic TV’s laugh tracks / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/05/14/secret-history-of-classic-tv.html
the rise of the laugh track was due to Charles Douglass (1910-2003), a Navy-trained electronics engineer/maker who went on to build a custom “Laff Box” of several dozen tape loops triggered by keys and dials. After its initial use on the Jack Benny Program, the machine, officially called the “Audience Reaction Duplicator,” took the TV industry by storm. Douglass “played” the Laff Box like a proto-sampler and for years had the monopoly on TV laugh tracks. It was a process that the TV show producers and Douglass himself liked to keep secret.
It wasn’t until 1992 that Douglass and his pioneering work at the intersection of media, psychology, and technology was recognized with a lifetime Emmy award for technical achievement.