Honeymoon

 

Emerson Romero was born in Havana in 1900. He was first cousin to actor Cesar Romero, who was born when Emerson was seven. Cesar used his birth name, but Emerson used the screen name Tommy Albert. Emerson appeared in dozens of movies – most of them comedies – until 1927, when the first “talkies” came out. Emerson had lost his hearing to whooping cough at age six. He could read lips and speak after a fashion, but he couldn’t compete with the likes of Ronald Coleman or Charles Laughton. Actors without gorgeous voices weren’t the only casualties of talking pictures. Deaf audience members, who used to follow the action along with everyone else by reading intertitles, were suddenly left out. Emerson developed the first technique to pair captions with films, making them more accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing. His work inspired the invention of closed captioning used in TV shows and movies today.