Greeting from London. I have some similar discs. I don't know the full history but here goes. In the 1930s a cousin of my father was an engineer and designed a turntable which had two pickup arms. One for recording on to aluminium discs, the other for replay. I had one of these turntables as a kid. The record arm was broken but it was driven by a kind of lead screw.
AFAIK, the discs were meant to be played with a fibre needle and they did indeed play, using the replay arm. A steel needle would have badly damaged the disc. I think I have tried a couple with an ordinary 78s stylus on a modern turntable. Most of the discs had very shallow modulation and gave very poor results. I think I could hear my father singng on one of them. The best one was a recording from the radio of King Edward VIII abdication speech in 1936.
I think my father's cousin's company was called EAR. We certainly had an EAR gramophone when I was a kid. Collaro(?) 3 speed autochanger. Amplifier was probably ECC83+EL84+EZ80.
In the 1930s there was lots of work on audio recording. On steel tape with machines like the Blattnerphone and on disc such as the MSS. These were for professional use but I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people tried to make a domestic/semi-professional disc recorder.
By the late 1930s, direct disc recording was well established with machines such as the BBC Type C.
http://www.orbem.co.uk/repwar/wr_recorders.htm