Lou Ottens: Dutch inventor of the cassette tape dies at 94

Lou Ottens: Dutch inventor of the cassette tape dies at 94

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They said the inventor died at his home in Duizel, the Netherlands, on Saturday. His cause of death was not given.
It is estimated that 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide, according to Philips, the company he started working for in 1952. Ottens also supervised the team that developed the CD.

Ottens was described by Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as an “extraordinary man who loved technology”.

An engineer by profession, five years after joining Philips, Ottens became the head of the company’s product development department at his audio factory in Hasselt, Belgium.

In 1960, Ottens and his team developed the first portable recorder. At the time, all tape recorders used the reel-to-reel system, which meant that the tape had to be wound manually.

He revolutionized recorders two years later, by inventing the compact cassette. Due to the laborious nature of the reel-to-reel process, Ottens wanted to simplify the process, his family said.

Ottens cut a block of wood that would fit on the side of his jacket pocket to find the ideal size for the new bag. The block became the model from which the first portable tape recorder was made, said Philips.

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Surprisingly, his wooden prototype was later lost when used to support his monkey while changing a flat tire, added Philips.

In 1963, the development of the cassette and the playback device performed so well that they were presented at the Internationale Funkausstellung – a commercial exhibition of audio products – in Berlin.

Japan’s guests were inspired by his invention. The cassette was quickly copied by Japanese manufacturers in a different format and sold on the Japanese market, Philips said.

The cassette recorder was a great success worldwide, but mainly among young people in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

The device helped capture iconic sounds, according to Philips, which told a story shared by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who wrote in his 2010 autobiography “Life”: “I wrote the song ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep. of everything I had recorded, the music only exists thanks to God for the Philips recorder. I looked in the morning – I knew I had put a new tape in the previous night – but it was at the very end. Apparently, I had recorded something. I rewound it and then ‘Satisfaction’ sounded … and then 40 minutes of snoring.
Ottens oversaw the team that invented the CD, which was produced extensively by Sony-Philips and sold more than 200 billion copies worldwide, said Philips. He retired in 1986.

In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the cassette, a special exhibition was created to honor Ottens’ work at the Philips Museum. And the first cassette recorder is still on display as “a testament to its vision and innovation,” a Philips representative told CNN.

“Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology,” said Coolen, director of the Philips Museum, in a statement to CNN, adding that his inventions had “humble beginnings”.

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