Lou Ottens died. A modest Philips employee changed the lives of us all

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“We were guys who liked to play. At the time, we didn’t feel like we were working on something big. So she wasn’t even a big event, we had no idea what would come of it. And so you keep going, the work never ends… ”Lou Ottens once told Eindhoven Dagblad about working on the Compact Cassete system (Music Cassete), which for several decades has become the leading medium for sound recording and reproduction and storage in a shorter period of time. computer data.

Audio cassettes have sold more than one hundred billion worldwide, and although it was virtually pushed out by the digital CD system, especially in the 1990s, it is still found today. After all, new cassettes with a new tape are being produced again in one factory in Europe and one in America, and some bands even release their demos, sometimes even new albums, on them. You can listen to how the cassettes play in the article – How does a 45-year-old cassette play and how does a brand new cassette play? Listen.

You can read a lot of details about the cartridges (and view a pile of cartridges) in our photo gallery, which we prepared in 2013, when the compact cartridges celebrated their fiftieth anniversary.

Louis Ottens joined Philips in 1952 and eight years later became head of the newly formed development department in Hasselt, Belgium. They worked mainly on portable recorders, then of course still reels.

It was the awkwardness of handling large and delicate spools of magnetic tape on portable tape recorders (often in the field) that led Ottens and his team to develop a more durable and practical format.

“I was annoyed by the clumsy and user-unfriendly coil system. It’s that simple, “Ottens said later in an interview.

The new medium had to fit in his breast pocket, Ottens’s according to the Dutch News server tested using a wooden model. The compact cassette housed the supply and take-up reels in a plastic case, and the tape was guided so that it was not necessary to manually insert it into the tape drive.

The slogan “smaller than a box of cigarettes” was used in the introduction of the new medium at the IFA 1963 trade fair. To avoid the emergence of competing incompatible formats, Philips agreed with the Japanese company Sony, which began using Philips’ patented system – creating a worldwide standard.

Most Ottens regretted that the tiny portable player, now known as the walkman, was developed first by Sony and not by Philips. The public more often associates tapes with Sony.

Nineteen years later, the same pair of companies, Philips and Sony, were behind the development and introduction of the digital Compact Disc format. Even in this case, Ottens was in charge of the Dutch part of the development.

Lou Ottens died on Saturday, March 6, at the age of 94.

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