
Dutch engineer was also instrumental in development of first CD in his work at Philips
Daniel Boffey, The Guardian | Thu 11 Mar 2021
Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer credited with inventing the cassette tape and playing a major role in the development of the first CD, has died aged 94 at his home in the village of Duizel in North Brabant.
As product development manager at Philips, Ottens twice revolutionised the world of music, but he remained modest to the end. “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.”
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.
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!”
Ottens did not back the recent resurgence of the cassette tape. 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.
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Workshy and lazy that Ottens bloke.....if he'd put a bit more effort in he could've invented bluetooth by 1985.......some people are just slackers hey?
I never liked them, no snobbery here. I can remember taping over pre recorded tapes by wadding up Kleenex and stuffing it in the indentations on the top of the tape!
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I remember recording “Star Trek” (the original series) during the original broadcasts, so I could listen to the show again.
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I still have a few metal tapes as well...and I don’t mean heavy metal 😁
Trading tapes was a huge part of my youth. I still have them all as well as some of the lists. All the most exciting, rare treasures were on tapes. Live bootlegs, demo tapes, soundboards, practice sessions etc. Happy days!
Lou Ottens had unique vision. Embarrassed to admit that I can’t remember ever hearing about Lou before and I might not have even thought of who invented the cassette tape. Seems hard to believe. The cassette tape was such a big part of life for a large number of people from the early ‘70s up until maybe the late ‘80s or even early naughties. I can remember as a child fooling around with portable cassette recorders and having a lot of laughs, experimenting with friends, making mix tapes for myself and for other people in teenager years. I became practically buried in cassette tapes from childhood through young adult, especially. Had quite a collection of Indian cassette tapes when I was a teenager. Repaired a large number of cassettes when I worked for the Library for the Blind and Print Handicapped. There’s a bit in Keith Richards’ book about how he used several portable cassette players in the recording of ‘Gimme Shelter’ was it? Have to re-read that part.
Cassettes were a real game changer back in the day. I used to record all of my albums as soon as I got them home. That way the lps stayed pristine. Beat the hell out of 8-tracks in the car. Better sound and took up a lot less space. (they are back too apparently.) I had a friend back in high school in Santa Clara. He had an cassette changer. You piled cassettes in the hopper and the first side of each would be played.
There is also a lot of new material being releases on cassettes. Amazing.
I love cassette tapes!...I still use them, record little guitar ideas etc, I have various cassette players and still listen to commercially released pre-recorded tapes. Have quite a number of classical cassettes manufactured in the 60's and 7o's, and rock and pop tapes, and the vast majority have stood the test of time very well, and sound great.
There was a whole thing back then, when, as a consumer, you could first get your hands on cassette recorders and players = genuinely innovating and so exciting at the time..I remember a similar exciting buzz around that period, with electronic calculators and LCD watches.. we'd never had or seen anything like it, ground breaking stuff and so happy to have been around when it happened.