In these digital days, it can be difficult to assess how Lou Ottens radically changed the world of audio when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, launched the cassette.
“As the story goes, Lou was at home one night trying to hear a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape started to get rid of his reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.
Mr. Ottens was responsible for product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.
“The next morning,” continued Mr. Taylor, “a frustrated Lou Ottens brought together engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something fail-safe: the tape had to be closed and the player had to fit in your pocket jacket. “
The cassette tape was a way of playing music in a portable way, something that was not easy to make with vinyl, and also to record it conveniently. Artists started using cassette tapes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live shows for the underground market. Young lovers used them to exchange mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.
Soon the record companies started releasing entire albums on cassette tapes and the automakers were installing tape players on the panels.
Another portable technology, the bulky 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but the smaller, recordable cassettes quickly condemned these devices and also entered the vinyl market.
“It was a big surprise for the market,” Ottens told Time magazine in 2013, the 50th anniversary of this wallet-sized discovery. “It was so small compared to reel-to-reel recorders that at that moment it was a sensation.”
Ottens died on Saturday in Duizel, the Netherlands, said Tommie Dijstelbloem, a spokesman for Philips. He was 94 years old.
In the 1970s, after leading the development of the cassette, he contributed to the development of the CD, a product that Philips and Sony launched together in 1982. The new format soon put the cassette aside.
“The best thing about the compact cassette’s history,” wrote the Nederlands Dagblad newspaper in 2011, “is that its inventor also caused it to fall.”
Not exactly. The cassettes remain popular with some aficionados, in a somewhat retro way. Mr. Ottens, however, was not one of them.
“Now it’s more or less nostalgia,” he said in the documentary. “People prefer worse sound quality out of nostalgia.”
Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, The Netherlands, on June 21, 1926. He graduated from the current Delft University of Technology in mechanical engineering and started working at Philips in 1952.
He became head of product development at Hasselt in 1957 and started overseeing the development of a portable reel to reel machine in 1960. Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, said that when he conceived the idea of a ribbon cassette, he carried a wooden pad in his coat pocket that was the size and shape he imagined.
“His wooden block prototype was lost when Lou used it to support his monkey while changing a flat tire,” she said by email. “However, we still have the first cassette recorder he developed on display, a testament to his vision and innovation.”
The company unveiled the cassette in 1963 at a product exhibition in Berlin. The old saying about imitation being the most sincere form of flattery was quickly proved.
“Our cassette tape was widely seen and photographed by the Japanese,” Ottens told an interviewer in 2013. “A few years later, the first Japanese imitations came, with a different tape format, different dimensions, different playing time. It is not shocking, but many have reached the market. So it’s a big mess. “
Philips made its licensing available for free, largely at the insistence of Ottens, and its version of the cassette soon became the standard.
“That’s the reason it didn’t become obsolete anytime soon,” said Ottens in the film, “and it took 50 years to die.”
Philips says that 100 billion cassettes have been sold worldwide.
After the cassette, Mr. Ottens worked on an unsuccessful videodisc project before moving on to the CD. And before this innovation was launched, he shifted his focus to Video 2000, a system designed to compete with VHS; he didn’t catch it either.
He retired from Philips in 1986. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
The creators of “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape” had a romanticized view of the cassette tape and its importance to the countless people who used it in countless ways, but Taylor said that Ottens had a much more utilitarian view.
“Lou was never comfortable getting credit for the cassette tape or the incalculable impact it has had on music history,” said Taylor. “What I saw as a deeply personal medium, Lou saw as a pragmatic response to the uncomfortable nature of the reel-to-reel.”
In the film, Ottens and three of the men who worked with him on the cassette project recall. Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the small device.
“We expected it to be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”