So, FWIW, there you have Sprout giving generality its due. However, this is about the game show Wheel of Fortune, specifically. So now let's get down to specifics.
The game show Concentration, which debuted in 1958, was not among the "things" Sprout speaks of above. Did the limitations of the relatively primitive technology that existed at the time force the show's producers to go manual? Obviously not. Was the cost of mechanizing the production prohibitive, thereby rendering a "Vanna White" hiring necessary? Obviously not. Did the show's mechanization require the skills of highly trained technicians and engineers? Well, whatever the level of training required, obviously mechanization did not impose too formidable a challenge. After all, it happened.
Wheel's letter-flipping required no more technological sophistication than Concentration's number-flipping, meaning if such a "hands-free/Vanna-less" show could be produced by 1958 then production of a "hands-free" mid-'70s Wheel of Fortune would pose no technological challenge whatsoever. The technology that rendered the "letter turner" position obsolete long before it was even established arrived on the scene who knows how many decades earlier.
That was precisely the point of my first post to this thread which read as follows:
"There was no need for [a] Vanna White or anyone else to 'physically' turn the letters in 1975. No more than there was a need to 'physically' turn the numbers in 1958."
However, in speaking of "need" here, I was thinking strictly in technological terms. There did turn out, after all, to be a need for Wheel to go manual in its first year (discussed below), but it was of an entirely different nature than technological.
Sprout: "Yes, it would have been possible to build a mechanical system to turn the letters also. But they chose to manually do it."
The latter statement is a false assumption on Sprout's part. Fact is, at the show's inception the producers were forced to go manual when installation of the automated system they intended to implement was not completed in time.
"[Original Wheel of Fortune 'letter turner' Susan] Stafford became the show's hostess through odd circumstances: when Merv Griffin and his company were planning a 1974 revamp of the failed Shopper's Bazaar format, the puzzle board was to be the complete opposite of its 1973 pull-card system: namely, a fully-automated board with trilons. As this system was not completed in time, Susan was hired to turn the letters." (Wikipedia)
Then came Vanna. And the rest is history.
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