Lou Ottens (1926-2021) Dutch Engineer

Lou Ottens (1926-2021) Dutch engineer
Lou Ottens
Birth 20 Jun 1926
Bellingwolde, Bellingwedde Municipality, Groningen, Netherlands
Death 6 Mar 2021 (aged 94)
Duizel, Eersel Municipality, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands
Burial Details Unknown
Dutch Engineer

Engineer. He is best known for being the creator of the cassette tape. The cassette tape was his answer to the large reel-to-reel tapes that provided high-quality sound but were seen as too clunky and expensive. He took on the challenge of shrinking tape technology in the early 1960s, when he became the head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch-based Philips technology company.

He 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.” Ottens advocated for Philips to license this new format to other manufacturers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard. First, he had to invent it. Trying to envision something that did not yet exist, he used a wooden block that was small and thin enough to fit in his pocket as the target for what the future of tape recording and playback should be.

The result was unveiled to the world in 1963, and the “compact cassette” quickly took off: It was “a sensation” from the start, he told Time in 2013, on the cassette’s 50th anniversary. Philips Museum Director Olga Coolen noted that Ottens’ original wooden prototype for the cassette “was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire.” Ottens went from building a radio for his family during World War II — it reportedly had a directional antenna so it could focus on radio signals despite Nazi jamming attempts — to developing technology that would democratize music.

He was famously unsentimental about the invention that has accounted for some 100 billion sales. In a career devoted to seeking higher fidelity and advancing technology, he dismissed tapes as primitive and prone to noise and distortion. True to their do-it-yourself roots, cassette mixtapes have long been a favorite of punk and rock fans.

But their legacy also looms large in hip-hop, where aspiring rappers and producers have used the approach to showcase their ability to chop up other music and create something new. The mixtape ethos has survived — and even thrived — despite the move from magnetic tapes to CDs and digital formats.

Nearly 20 years after Philips introduced cassette tapes, Ottens helped the company to develop compact disc technology for the consumer market and, with Sony, to settle on a format that would become the industry standard. He declared that the conventional record player is obsolete when production CD players emerged.

Similar predictions were made about the cassette tape. But interest in the format has surged in recent years, despite the remaking of the music industry in the digital and streaming age.

Ottens’ death follows a banner year for his invention. In 2020, a wide range of musicians found success selling cassette tapes, from Lady Gaga and Ozzy Osbourne to Selena Gomez and Gorillaz.

Lou Ottens (1926-2021) Dutch Engineer