Dutch engineer and inventor Lou Ottens died on the 6th of this month at the age of 94. Born on June 1, 1926, Lodewijk Frederik Ottens became best known as the inventor of the cassette tape.
Ottens started working at Philips in 1952 and years later became head of the company's product development department. His team developed the first portable recorder, revolutionized the Reel to Reel Tape Deck system, giving rise to cassette tape. The first plastic cassette was presented at an electronics fair in 1963. Ottens designed the cassette to fit in a jacket pocket. The invention was licensed by Philips and it was the Japanese Sony that launched standard cassette tape and popularized it, mainly with its Walkman player.
When he created the original prototype, Ottens saw his invention as a tool for journalists to record his work. However, from the end of the 1970s, this physical media became an alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP.
The popularity of the cassette is due to its ease of use, the custom of people to listen to their music in cars and mainly to be a popular recording medium, using the so-called “virgin tapes”.
The decline of cassette tapes began in the early 1990s, with the perfecting of CDs, a format that Lou Ottens helped to create when, in 1979, Philips and Sony jointly developed the standard that became universal.
In recent years, there has been a revival of the cassette, with several artists releasing their albums in the format created by Ottens. In the year 2020, in the United Kingdom the album Chromatica by Lady Gaga sold 14,000 copies in the format.