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The tributes came on Friday after Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who is credited with inventing the audiotape and helping create the compact disc, died at the age of 94.
Created by Ottens while working for electrical giant Philips, the cassettes made music truly portable for the first time and allowed a generation of music fans to mix their favorite songs.
Versatile, yet infuriatingly easy to unroll, more than 100 billion cassette tapes were produced worldwide at their peak from the 1960s to the 1980s and have even enjoyed a recent retro revival.
“We were all saddened to hear about the passing of Lou Ottens,” said Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, in a statement sent to AFP.
“Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology, even when his inventions had a humble beginning.”
He died on March 6 in the town of Duizel, near the Belgian border, Philips said.
Born in 1926 in the Dutch city of Bellingwolde, Ottens showed his interest in technology at a young age during the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in World War II.
He built a radio to receive the “free Dutch” Radio Oranje with a special antenna that he called “Germanenfilter” because he could avoid Nazi blockers, Dutch newspaper NRC reported.
Ottens joined Philips after studying engineering at university, where he and his team developed the world’s first portable recorder, according to Philips.
But he was frustrated with the bulky reel-to-reel system that required manual winding and so he invented the cassette in 1962.
“The cassette tape was invented out of irritation with the existing tape recorder, it’s that simple,” said Ottens, quoted by NRC in an interview.
‘Wood block’
The technology that made the portable cassette player possible and filled millions of teenage bedrooms with music began in the humblest way, Coolen said.
“During the development of the cassette tape in the early 1960s, (Ottens) made a block of wood that fit exactly in his coat pocket,” he added.
“This is how big the first compact cassette was going to be, which made it much more manageable than the bulky recorders that were in use at the time.”
The historic woodblock prototype was sadly lost “when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire,” Coolen added.
Ottens then oversaw a team that developed the compact disc that was later produced by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.
Since then, more than 200 billion CDs have been produced, Philips said.
Once consigned to the dustbin of musical history, cassettes have been enjoying a revival of late.
Cassette record sales in the United States grew 23 percent in 2018, according to tracker Nielsen Music, from 178,000 copies the year before to 219,000.
Despite being the unsung hero of the music world, Ottens’s career was not without its frustrations.
Sony released not only its first CD before Philips, but also the famous Walkman that transformed the way people listen to music; years later he said “it still hurts that we didn’t have one.”
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