Cassette tape inventor revolutionised the way the world listened to music

Lou Ottens, who has died aged 94, was a Dutch engineer credited with inventing the compact audio cassette, a development said to have ‘‘democratised’’ music by providing fledgling bands, who lacked the budget for a recording studio, to get their music on to the market, and allowing fans to create homemade ‘‘mixtapes’’ of favourite songs from the radio or vinyl records.

In the 1960s, as head of product development for the Philips electronics factory in Hasselt, Belgium, Ottens became frustrated with the unwieldy reel-to-reel tape recorders the factory produced, which involved having to thread thin magnetic tape through mechanical guides, and decided there was a need for an audio device that was cheaper, less fiddly and small enough to fit into a jacket pocket.

He and his development team came up with the idea of encasing a slimmed-down version of the reel-to-reel tape in plastic housing, and the audio cassette, marketed as ‘‘Smaller than a pack of cigarettes!’’, made its debut at the Berlin Radio Show in 1963.

Philips patented the term ‘‘compact cassette tape’’ and developed a player to handle the new format. Rather than patenting the design, however, Ottens urged the company to share its cassette technology, providing that manufacturers adhered to the company’s specifications. ‘‘That’s the reason it didn’t become obsolete too early,’’ he said.

Philips struck a deal with Sony to make its soon-to-be-ubiquitous portable cassette player, the Walkman, released in 1979. Ottens thus helped to establish a uniform standard that ensured cassettes sold in one country would work in another.

As well as revolutionising the pop music scene (it is said that hip-hop would never have taken off without it), the tapes were used to record telephone messages and books, in dictation devices and car stereos.

According to NME, an estimated 100 billion cassettes have been sold in the past 58 years, a statistic Ottens had never dreamt would be possible. ‘‘We were little boys who had fun playing,’’ he told a Dutch newspaper. ‘‘We didn’t feel like we were doing anything big. It was a kind of sport.’’

The cassette became part of popular culture. Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, told of waking one morning and noticing that the cassette by his bed had played to the end, so he rewound it and listened. ‘‘He hears himself getting up in the middle of the night, playing (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, and then there’s a half-hour of snoring,’’ music historian John Covach said of how the Stones’

1965 hit was reputedly saved from oblivion. Cassettes fell out of favour from the early

1990s after they were overtaken by compact discs, which not only offered better sound quality but could not get tangled up in the works. Ottens was also part of the Philips team which contributed to the invention of the CD in 1979.

In recent years cassettes have experienced a revival, though Ottens was bemused by the resurgence of a technology he regarded as obsolete. In 2016 the spry nonagenarian appeared in Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, in which director Zack Taylor invited his audience to celebrate ‘‘the worst format in the history of music’’. Some people, Ottens observed, ‘‘prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia’’.

The son of schoolteachers, Lodewijk Frederik Ottens was born in Bellingwolde, in the Netherlands, and brought up in Hilversum. Fascinated by technology from an early age, during World War II he built a radio so the family could listen to broadcasts from London during the German occupation.

He did military service in the Dutch air force, but poor eyesight restricted him to ground duties. Later he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Technology in Delft while working part-time in a factory that built X-ray equipment. On graduating in 1952, he joined Philips in Eindhoven.

He married Margo van Noord, a law student, in 1955. She died in 2002 and he is survived by two daughters and a son.

Sailing was his lifelong passion. He started with a small open boat and ended with a 31ft Dehler Optima 92 yacht. In retirement he acquired more hobbies, including drawing and portrait painting. A man of many talents, he was also interested in birds, plants, history, art, classical music, and literature; he and Margo kept airedale terriers.

Although Ottens is often described as inventing the cassette tape, he insisted he could take credit only for the idea. ‘‘Successful products are created by normal people who just follow their intuition, work hard, make mistakes and work together as a bunch of friends,’’ he said. ‘‘I have done nothing special.’’ –

‘‘We were little boys who had fun playing. We didn’t feel like we were doing anything big.’’