Reel genius who invented cassette tapes dies at 94
HE revolutionised the way we listen to music and allowed a generation of teenagers to make mixtapes to impress friends.
By inventing the ‘compact cassette’ Lou Ottens, who has died aged 94, allowed on-the-go listening for the first time.
His innovation, in 1963, paved the way for the Sony Walkman which helped boost cassette sales past the 100billion mark.
As well as transforming the music scene, cassette tapes meant you could listen to the music of your choice in the car. They were also used to record audio books and telephone messages.
Mr Ottens would go on to help develop another music breakthrough, the compact disc.
He even lived long enough for the cassette, thought to have been rendered obsolete by the emergence of the CD, to undergo a minor renaissance.
Born in a Dutch village near the German border in June 1926, Mr Ottens was fascinated by engineering from an
‘It was an instant sensation’
early age. His first invention was a radio capable of avoiding signal-jammers used by the Nazis.
After the war, he obtained an engineering degree and began working for Philips in Eindhoven in 1952.
He was made head of Philips’ product development department in 1960.
Frustrated by the bulkiness and clumsiness of reel-to-reel tapes, Mr Ottens and his team worked to condense the technology. His idea was that the cassette tape should fit in the inside pocket of his jacket.
The first success was the Philips EL3585 – a portable battery-powered tape recorder which used reel-to-reel formatting and would go on to sell more than one million units.
Two years later, the cassette made its debut at the 1963 Berlin Radio Show, and was marketed as being smaller than a packet of cigarettes.
At first, cassettes were mainly used to record voices and dictation. But the technology quickly improved to allow music to be stored on the tiny magnetic reels. Ottens convinced Philips to share the cassette technology with other companies and later struck a deal with Sony to make the Walkman, which was released in 1979.
Mr Ottens famously said in 1982: ‘From now on, the conventional record player is obsolete.’ He worked with Sony on the next major musical innovation, the CD, which launched in 1980 and of which more than 200 billion have been sold.
Mr Ottens retired in 1986. In a 2013 interview with Time magazine to mark the 50th anniversary of the cassette tape, he said it was a ‘sensation’ from the moment it was unveiled. While cassette tapes were largely considered obsolete by 2000, due to the popularity of CDs, there has been a resurgence in their popularity in recent years despite the emergence of new ways of listening to music, such as MP3s and streaming.
In 2020, more than 150,000 cassettes were sold in the UK – double the previous year’s total.
Mr Ottens said he was bemused by this, adding that fans seem to ‘prefer a worse quality of sound out of nostalgia’ and that ‘nothing can match the sound of the CD’.
He died near Eindhoven on Saturday, his family said yesterday.