11/12/2023 0 Comments Lou ottens cassette tape hasOttens’ tape had saved one of rock’s great songs.Īlthough Ottens could not quite eliminate the problems of drawing tape tight, cassette users discovered quickly that a six-sided pencil or Bic pen was a perfect tool to fix the tape safely in an instant. He fell asleep one night with the recorder on, and awoke to discover that, bookended by the sounds of his snoring, he had put the first version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on tape, though he had no memory of it. As it happened, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones used his Philips recorder for making demos. But another of their unforeseen benefits was the home recording of music. Ottens had thought cassettes might prove useful for business, in recording voice, and to hobbyists who wanted to record sound in the outdoors. Photograph: unomat/Getty Images/iStockphoto (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.Boomboxes facilitated the recording of radio broadcasts and from one cassette deck to another, to create mix tapes. Lou Ottens died over the weekend in his native country, the Netherlands. KELLY: Zack Taylor talking about the man who dreamed up the audio cassette. It took him 50 years, but when he left us, he finally understood. TAYLOR: Lou finally started to understand the emotional quotient, the sentimentality, the power that cassettes have to the individual. Still, filmmaker Zack Taylor says Ottens did eventually see what the cassette had brought to others. Later, he turned his attention to developing compact disc technology. He described them as primitive and prone to noise and distortion. But Ottens himself was never satisfied with the low fidelity of audiocassettes. SHAPIRO: For a generation of people who grew up making their own mixtapes on cassettes, the invention was nothing short of genius. LOU OTTENS: I can be credited for the idea and a number of ideas in it, but the draftsmen, the electrical designers and the industrial designer, they have done the work. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CASSETTE: A DOCUMENTARY MIXTAPE") Ottens told Time magazine it was a sensation from the start, but he was humble about his contribution. KELLY: The compact cassette was unveiled in Berlin in 1963. TAYLOR: Lou's thing was he wanted it to be easy, and he wanted it to fit in his jacket pocket. KELLY: And that very clever man led to a revolution in how we listen to music and share it. The legend of the cassette is that the cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man. He towered over me even when he was in his 90s. TAYLOR: I swear in his prime, he must have been 7 feet tall. SHAPIRO: Zack Taylor met Ottens while making his film, "Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape." SHAPIRO: Well, in the early 1960s, Lou Ottens was head of product development for the electronics company Philips. No wonder the average consumer never fancied it. It was recorded and played on open reels of spinning quarter-inch tape, tape that would have to be threaded ever so carefully through an array of little cylinders. Let's rewind to the days before Ottens' creation.
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