Lou Ottens, the man behind our compilation cassettes, dies at 94
Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer credited with inventing the audio cassette tape, has died in the age of 94.
The empty cassette – the one of 60 minutes, or 90 minutes, the one where you could collect all your favourite songs, your identity as a teenager – and carry with you.
The cassette, where you could compile all the love songs and record a dedication, before you handed it over to a person of interest, hoping it will have a magic, seductive effect on them.
The cassette, where you could steal and take from a friend’s vinyl record, the latest album of your favourite band – it was only the really worthy releases that deserved the money of a record; while the rest… ‘we got them on tape’!
Developed in early ’60s
An estimated 100 billion cassette tapes have been sold around the world since they were introduced in the 1963, it was presented at the Berlin Radio electronics fair and soon became a worldwide success.
Ottens’ invention transformed the way people listened to music, and there has even been a resurgence of the cassette in recent years.
Ottens became head of Philips’ product development department in 1960, where he and his team developed the cassette tape. As product development manager at Philips, Ottens twice revolutionised the world of music, but kept the fun in his heart all the way long: “We were little boys who had fun playing,” he said. “We didn’t feel like we were doing anything big. It was a kind of sport.”
Fixing free radio during German occupation
Ottens, born on 21 June 1926, showed an early interest in engineering, building a radio as a teenager through which he and his parents could receive Radio Oranje during Germany’s wartime occupation of the Netherlands. He equipped the device with a directional antenna that he called a “Germanenfilter” because it could avoid the jammers used by the Nazi regime.
Following the war, Ottens obtained an engineering degree, and he started work at the Philips factory in Hasselt, Belgium, in 1952. Eight years later he was promoted to head of the company’s newly established product development department, and within a year he unveiled the EL 3585, Philips’s first portable tape recorder, which would go on to sell more than a million units.
Irritation mother of invention
But it was two years later that Ottens made the biggest breakthrough of his life – born out of annoyance with the clumsy and large reel-to-reel tape systems of the time. “The cassette tape was invented out of irritation about the existing tape recorder, it’s that simple,” he would later say.
Ottens’s idea was that the cassette tape that should fit in the inside pocket of his jacket. In 1963 the first tape was presented to the world at an electronics fair in Berlin with the tagline “Smaller than a pack of cigarettes!”
Photographs of the invention made their way to Japan, where substandard copies started to emerge. Ottens made agreements with Sony for the patented Philips mechanism to be the standard.
It led to the mixtapes beloved by teenagers across the world and the frustration of the unspooled tape, albeit largely fixable with the insertion and twirl of a disposable pen.
And after the cassette… the CD
In 1972 Ottens became director of audio at Philips’ NatLab, where he became involved in the next major music innovation: the CD. A collaboration was entered into with Sony and in 1980 the 12cm Philips-Sony CD standard was ready for the world.
More than 100bn cassette tapes and 200bn CDs have been sold. When asked about his regrets, Ottens lamented that Sony had brought out the first Walkman. “It still hurts that we didn’t have one,” he said.
Ottens, who died on Saturday, was a true man of progress and never had little patience with the renewed popularity of the cassette tape – or even vinyl.
Always in favour of progress – even against his own inventions
“Nothing can match the sound of the CD,” he had told the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “It is absolutely noise and rumble-free. That never worked with tape … I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. I think people mainly hear what they want to hear.”
Moonshot News is an independent European news website for all IT, Media and Advertising professionals, powered by women and with a focus on driving the narrative for diversity, inclusion and gender equality in the industry.
Our mission is to provide top and unbiased information for all professionals and to make sure that women get their fair share of voice in the news and in the spotlight!
We produce original content, news articles, a curated calendar of industry events and a database of women IT, Media and Advertising associations.
