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From The Daily Telegraph, obituaries page:
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 “mix-tapes” 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 the user 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.
Soon afterwards Philips patented the term “compact cassette tape” and developed a player to handle the new format. Rather than patenting the design, however, Ottens urged Philips to share the company’s cassette technology, and subsequently struck a deal with Sony to make the Japanese company’s 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a uniform standard that ensured cassettes sold in one country would work in another; the compact cassette also superseded the bulkier “8-track” cartridge that had remained popular, mainly in North America, for in-car dashboard players.
As well as revolutionising the pop music scene (it is said that hip-hop would never have taken off without it), the tapes also were used to record telephone messages and books, and used in pocket dictation devices and car stereos. Streets all over the world suddenly seemed to be full of people plugged into their Walkmans.
The cassette fell out of favour from the early 1990s after they were overtaken by compact discs, which not only offered better sound quality but had the undeniable advantage that they 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 something of 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 the 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, on June 21 1926 and brought up in Hilversum. Fascinated by technology from an early age, during the Second World War he built a radio so that the family could listen to broadcasts from London during the German occupation.
After graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical College (Institute) of Delft (now the Delft University of Technology), he joined Philips in 1952 and in 1960 became the head of product development for the company’s Hasselt division, which specialised in audio equipment, including turntables, tape recorders, and loudspeakers. In 1969 Ottens became Director of Philips Hasselt.
After contributing to the development of the CD, he worked on a Philips team that introduced it to the market with Sony in 1982. His only regret, when he retired in 1986, was that it was Sony rather than Philips that had developed the Walkman.
Ottens’s wife Margo, whom he married in 1958, died in 2002. Their three children survive him.
Lou Ottens, born June 21 1926, died March 6 2021
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 the user 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.
Soon afterwards Philips patented the term “compact cassette tape” and developed a player to handle the new format. Rather than patenting the design, however, Ottens urged Philips to share the company’s cassette technology, and subsequently struck a deal with Sony to make the Japanese company’s 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; the compact cassette also superseded the bulkier “8-track” cartridge that had remained popular, mainly in North America, for in-car dashboard players.
As well as revolutionising the pop music scene (it is said that hip-hop would never have taken off without it), the tapes also were used to record telephone messages and books, and used in pocket dictation devices and car stereos. Streets all over the world suddenly seemed to be full of people plugged into their Walkmans.
The cassette fell out of favour from the early 1990s after they were overtaken by compact discs, which not only offered better sound quality but had the undeniable advantage that they 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 something of 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 the 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, on June 21 1926 and brought up in Hilversum. Fascinated by technology from an early age, during the Second World War he built a radio so that the family could listen to broadcasts from London during the German occupation.
After graduating in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical College (Institute) of Delft (now the Delft University of Technology), he joined Philips in 1952 and in 1960 became the head of product development for the company’s Hasselt division, which specialised in audio equipment, including turntables, tape recorders, and loudspeakers. In 1969 Ottens became Director of Philips Hasselt.
After contributing to the development of the CD, he worked on a Philips team that introduced it to the market with Sony in 1982. His only regret, when he retired in 1986, was that it was Sony rather than Philips that had developed the Walkman.
Ottens’s wife Margo, whom he married in 1958, died in 2002. Their three children survive him.
Lou Ottens, born June 21 1926, died March 6 2021
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