One of the analog tech fans featured the Sony Flamingo. It was a marketing flop; apparently it didn’t work well and people didn’t like putting records in vertically.
Raises yet another question about the history of the phonograph. When cylinders were replaced by disks around 1915, why weren’t the disks vertical, with a threaded gear moving the needle as it did in the cylinder? It would have been a smaller change in geometry and mechanism. Conceptually, just reduce the length of the cylinder and move the needle across the end instead of the circumference.
The advantage of flat records is instantly obvious. Flat things are easier to store than cylindrical things. Flat records can be stacked without any enclosures, while cylindrical records need to be kept in boxes, or in a gridded cabinet with ‘pigeonholes’.
Vertical disks would still need a needle moved by a threaded shaft. Since that was the norm with dictaphones and cylinder players, it wouldn’t have been new. The needle in the Sony was pulled by a motor, with pulleys and strings allowing a bit of slack to let it find the groove. (Soft power is sometimes the simplest solution.) It would have needed complex sensors and feedback systems to stay in the groove if the record was off standard or off center. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work well?
There was no precedent for a loose arm on horizontal disks. Horizontal magnetic disks, from Poulsen’s 1904 Telegraphone to IBM drives of 1957 to the modern HDD, have firm control on the arm. It was threaded at first, then magnetically controlled later.
Horizontal disks don’t need a controlled arm because they’re not fighting gravity, but a controlled arm would have made the phonograph work better, especially in portable or automotive situations. Dictaphones could be used in cars. The loose arm only works in an absolutely stable location, and the best turntables maintained absolute stability with massive bases and shock mounts.
Jukeboxes often played the record vertically. The most common type had a bookshelf of 45s. The vertical turntable moved back and forth across the bookshelf to find the selected record. The record was pushed out of the shelf into the clamps of the turntable, which held it centered while the tone arm moved into the grooves. I tried to find a patent showing how the arm was controlled, but couldn’t find it easily, and I don’t feel like spending a lot of time on this. It’s just another puzzle in the history of the phonograph.
The biggest puzzle, of course, is why the cylindrical form had to wait for Edison. The dictaphone was just a slightly modified music box. Music boxes were manufactured for 300 years before Edison, but no music box maker ever thought of the slight modification.
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