Re: Why both 33 and 45 ?
As stated in #2 it was a probably a deliberate format war:
The story is that David Sarnoff gave his engineers the brief to do anything as long as it was incompatible with Columbia's LP system. They failed in that it was still micro groove, but they achieved the rest and backed it up with a lot of facts and figures to say why it was designed by science, not out of spite honest.
In reality the world had tired of a system that could not record longer pieces of music without a break and Peter Goldmark's invention of the LP solved that problem. Eventually the 45 found its natural home with 3 minute pop songs so everyone was happy.
HMV did try to sell a badged version of the RCA 45 changer in about 1951, but it soon faded from the market, beaten by the 3 speed units that could play everything.
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