Tributes rolled out on Friday after Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who is believed to have invented the audio cassette tape and helped create the compact disc, died at the age of 94.
The cassettes were created by Ottens while working at the electric giant Philips, and made music really portable for the first time.
Versatile as well as furiously easy to flush, over 100 billion cassettes were produced worldwide in their heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s and even enjoyed a recent retro boom.
“It saddened us all to hear of Lou Ottens’ passing,” Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, said in a statement to AFP.
“Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology, even though his invention had a humble beginning.”
He died on March 6 in the town of Duizel near the Belgian border, Philips said.
Ottens was born in the Dutch city of Bellingwolde in 1926 and showed his interest in technology at a young age during the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in World War II.
He built a radio to receive the ‘free Dutch’ Radio Oranje with a special antenna he called the ‘Germanenfilter’ because it could avoid Nazi jammers, Dutch newspaper NRC report.
Ottens joined Philips after studying engineering, where he and his team, according to Philips, developed the world’s first portable tape recorder.
But he became frustrated with the bulky pulley-to-pulley system that had to be wound manually and invented the cassette in 1962.
“The cassette tape was invented out of annoyance over the existing tape recorder, it’s that simple,” NRC said in one interview by NRC.
‘Wooden block’
The technology that made the portable cassette player possible and filled millions of teenage bedrooms with music started in the most humble way, Coolen said.
“During the development of the cassette tape (Ottens), in the early 1960s, he made a wooden block that fit exactly into his coat pocket,” she added.
“It was how big the first compact cassette had to be, which makes it much more convenient than the bulky tape recorders that were in use at the time.”
The historic prototype of wooden blocks was unfortunately ‘lost when Lou used it to push up his jack while exchanging a flat tire’, Coolen added.
Ottens then oversaw a team that developed the compact disc that was then manufactured by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.
More than 200 billion CDs have been produced since then, Philips said.
Once cassettes were transferred to the trash of music history, they enjoyed the revival of recent times.
According to tracker Nielsen Music, sales of cassette tape albums in the US grew by 23 percent in 2018, rising from 178,000 copies the previous year to 219,000.
Despite being the unsung hero of the music world, Ottens’ career was not without frustrations.
Sony not only released its first CD in front of Philips, but also the famous Walkman who changed the way people listen to music – years later he said that ‘it still hurts that we did not have one’.
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