I’ll let my six-year-old self know that. He’s not allowed to play with the oven, but maybe he can just stick it back in the car in the Sun. 
(I do still have a couple of warped records, I think. Might give this a try.)
An escapement actually. Rotary escapements often act on wheels identical to ratchet wheels, to the confusion is understandable.
Actually, that’s not entirely correct. I have an old Dual 1019 turntable from the 70’s or 80’s and while it doesn’t have the movable arm feature, it does have an escapement mechanism underneath and comes with a removable spindle that could hold several records and can still drop them one at a time, should I choose to employ it.
Oddly enough, sometimes you heard people use the term “record changer” to mean the entire turntable unit. I think it was a dialectical or regional American thing.
You know how you can tell if you’re old?
Well, when you’re listening to the CD of Sergeant Pepper…well, that’s how you tell, right there. 
No, seriously. You know you’re old if, when listening to this CD and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” comes on, you have to suppress a tiny visceral twinge telling you you’re going to have to turn the record over in a couple of minutes.
“Mystery” bar? Not such a mystery if you grew up in the 60s and 70s. When I was a kid, we had a big cabinet style stereo with a 6 LP record changer. It also had a fatter spindle that slipped over the regular one so you could also stack 45 rpm records on it. I remember being given “Jesus Christ, Superstar” as a present. Sides 1 and 4 were on one disc, and 2 and 3 were on the second disc. When I played it, I stacked it so the disc with side 2 was on top of side 1. The first two sides would play in order, then I picked the two LPs up from the turntable, flipped them over so side 3 and 4 were in order, and played those two sides.
I remember seeing a pretty unique turntable with auto reverse about 30 years ago. I can’t find any pictures of it, but the turntable was about the size of the LP label and was raised from the platform. It had a linear-tracking tone arm that would play one side of the LP, then when that side was finished, the tone arm would rise, continue over the top of the record, invert, and start playing the other side of the record from underneath as the turntable reversed direction. When the second side was finished, the stylus would retract from the record, and reverse its trajectory, clear from under the record, flip back right-side up, then pass over top of the LP and return to the cradle.
I know exactly when it happened.
The first time I saw a centerfold born after I graduated high school. 
I had a boom box in the 80s from JC Penney that had two cassette decks and an 8 track player. The cassette deck with the record button could record either from the radio, the second cassette deck, or the 8 track player.
The good turntables stopped turning before the record dropped and muted the needle so it wouldn’t pick up any noise from the mechanism or record dropping.
My dad had one of those, it was, iirc, a United Audio brand turntable. cool thing was you could unscrew the center spindle and replace it with a single play spindle, the little catches on the side were activated by a rod in the player that pushed into the spindle itself; when the single play spindle was placed in there, the turntable would stop playing after one go round instead of autorepeating the record. If you didn’t put the spindle on and put the record on the platter non centered, you would get this weird slow/fast oscillation of speed of the music that us kids thought was hilarious and made my mom freak out because we were ruining their records.
quick look found what looks like his exact model on ebay. unfortunately this one has the single play spindle and a 45 rpm adapter on it, not the autochanging spindle.
The one we had (and it’s still sitting here beside me though I hardly ever use it except for 78rpm ones now) had a changer but we never used it. It was understood that you just didn’t treat records like that.
I had an old Kenwood turntable from the 1970s, and it had a little weight on a tiny thread, behind the fulcrum of the tone arm, that you could set in various positions to prevent skipping. BTW this is the turntable that a guy on my floor in college would call a “record changer” when he asked if he could use it. And this one didn’t even have the actual record changing mechanism at all.
I kept the unit right up the beginning of 2009 when I gave it up. I still have a good many LPs, though, including that original copy of Sergeant Pepper.
I have been looking at videos of old record changers on YouTube and some of them are quite fascinating. There is a video of a Victor-V225 record changer from the late 1930s which does not drop the records on to each other. When the record on the turntable is finished playing, it is dropped into a padded collection bin before the next record drops onto the turntable. This is because the turntable has an early form of auto-reverse. The turntable is only 2 1/2 inches wide and there are two tone arms in a fork-like arrangement. When side 1 is finished, the tone arm will swing out of the way, the turntable will reverse direction, then the stylus in the other part of the tone arm assembly will press on the record from the underside and play side 2. Check it out in action in the video.
Wow, this thread is bringing back memories. Like of my brother wearing a dashiki and opening up the top of our old console stereo to stack the platters of the latest offering from Chicago.
Or of my best friend Brad never putting records back in the sleeves, just tossing them on the floor willy nilly, where the dog would walk over them. I still hear Great Gig in the Sky as having the sound of rainfall in the background. But it wasn’t rainfall. It was scratches.
Unintentional post. Never mind.
Just wanted to point out probably the most sophisticated record changer ever manufactured (at least during vinyl’s heyday) - the late 1970’s ADC Accutrac +6 (link directs to video).
This turntable actually raised the stack on the platter up to meet the records waiting to be played, so there was no drop and no slipping. It also had the ability to address individual tracks on the record with buttons on the front, by searching for the bands in between each track using an LED reflecting light back to a sensor in the tonearm (although IIRC you couldn’t program it), and was also remote controlled (although the remote used ultrasonic rather than IR signals). Later linear tracking single-play turntables from various manufacturers (most notably Technics) also had this ability, but I believe the Accutrac was the only changer.