The tapes, which measured an eighth of an inch wide, were played between two spools inside the cassette. The advantage of cassette tapes was that not only could listeners buy already recorded music, they also could record their own personal playlists on blank tapes, taping records or songs from their radios onto the container, which measured 4 inches by 2.5 inches and was only a half-inch wide. “Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible,” according to documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film, “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.” “He advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard.” aIH7S8phSZ- Ryan Schreiber March 10, 2021 Let’s take this moment to respect all the joy his work brought into our lives, and also to enjoy the many poses he struck with his invention. He would retire in 1986.Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape, has left the planet. Ottens would go on to work on the creation of the compact disk – or CD, of which more than 200 billion have sold across the world. In 2016, Ottens appeared in Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, a film that celebrated the history of the cassette and featured Henry Rollins, Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and Thurston Moore, among others. While reissues of classic albums are also getting limited edition cassette versions. And though streaming and downloads dominate today’s listening culture, there is still a nostalgic appeal for the cassette, with artists including Lady Gaga, The Streets and Dua Lipa releasing their albums on cassette format and with the BBC reporting that cassette sales had doubled in a year back in 2020. Their appeal took on a new form in the 80s and 90s, with people using them to make personalised mix tapes. Since its arrival in the 1960s, an estimated 100 billion audio cassette tapes have been sold worldwide. According to an interview with the engineer in Time magazine on the cassette’s 50th birthday, it was a “sensation” from day one. Ottens made a deal with Sony and Philips to patent his cassette, after Japanese companies began creating their own versions. It was created as a replacement for the cumbersome reel-to-reel tapes and advertised with the slogan, “smaller than a pack of cigarettes!” and made to fit inside a shirt or jacket pocket. Three years later they would present the tape at the Berlin Radio electronics fair and the rest is history. By 1960 he was head of Philips’ product development department, which is where he – alongside his team – developed the audio cassette tape. He went on to receive a degree in engineering and began working for Philips in their Belgian factory in 1952. He added a directional antenna to the radio, which he called a “Germanenfilter”, as it was capable of avoiding the jammers used by the Nazi regime to suppress banned broadcasts. Ottens was born on 21 June 1926 and began dabbling in engineering in his childhood, building his own radio to receive Radio Oranje while Germany occupied the Netherlands during the war. His family announced that he had died in his hometown of Duizel, North Brabant, last weekend. Lou Ottens, the Dutch engineer who is created as the inventor of the audio cassette tape has died, aged 94.
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