Lou Ottens, inventor of cassette tape, dead at 94

Lou Ottens, a Dutch engineer who made music more portable for listeners by inventing the cassette tape, died Saturday. He was 94.

>> Read more trending news

Ottens died in Duizel, Netherlands, according to the Netherlands news outlet NRC Handelsblad.

“We are very sad to have to inform you that Lou passed away peacefully on Saturday,” Ottens’ daughter, Arine Ottens, told WTOP.

Ottens was working for Royal Philips during the 1960s when music’s primary formats for recordings were vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes. Otten’s vision, begun when he was the head of Philips’ new product development division in Hasselt, Belgium, was a portable way to carry music, and in 1963 he invented the cassette tape, according to his obituary.

“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.”

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.

The tapes, which measured an eighth of an inch wide, were played between two spools inside the cassette. Many music listeners had to unspool a tape when it got tangled, but they were able to do so by placing a pencil inside the holes of the cassette tapes and rescue their music, WTOP reported.

The compact cassette was a hit as soon as it was introduced, Ottens told Time in 2013, on the cassette’s 50th anniversary.

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones famously recorded the fuzz-tone bass riff on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on a cassette.

“I wrote the song ‘Satisfaction’ in my sleep. I didn’t know at all that I had recorded it, the song only exists thank God to the little Philips cassette recorder,” Richards wrote in his 2010 autobiography, “Life.” “I looked at it in the morning -- I knew I had put a new tape in the night before -- but it was at the very end. Apparently, I had recorded something. I rewound and then ‘Satisfaction’ sounded … and then 40 minutes of snoring.”

“Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology, even as his inventions had humble beginnings,” Philips Museum Director Olga Coolen told NPR. “‘We knew it could become big but could have never imagined it would be a revolution.”

Coolen added that Ottens’ original wooden prototype for the cassette “was lost when Lou used it to prop up his jack while changing a flat tire.”

As technical director at Phillips Audio, Ottens was part of the team that developed the CD in 1979, the Calgary Herald reported.

Ottens often downplayed his role in the invention of the tape, WTOP reported.

“Everything disappears in the world when it has done its time. So will I.”

Cox Media Group