HAGUE, Netherlands – Manufacturer of cassette tapes, who also helped make CDs, Dutch engineers Loo OtensDied at the age of 94.
Created by Ottens while working for Vishal PHILIPSCassette tapes made music really portable for the first time and made it easy for a generation of musicians to record a compilation of their favorite songs.
With its two sides and very easy to manipulate, between 1960 and 1980 and the recently revived Retro, over 100 billion cassettes were manufactured in the world during its life.
“It is very sad to learn that Lou Ottens has passed away,” Olga Cullen, director of the Philips Museum in AFP One, said in a statement sent to AFP. “Lou was an extraordinary person who loved technology,” he said.
He died on March 6 in Duisel, near the border with Belgium, Phillips said.
Born in the Dutch city of Bellingwold in 1926, Ottens showed interest in technology from a very young age during the Nazi occupation of Holland in World War II.
He made a radio to listen to “Free Dutch” radio Orange With a special antenna he called “Germanfilter” (German filter), because it could bypass Nazi blockers, noted the NRC newspaper.
He joined Philips after studying engineering at the University of Ottens, where he and his team built the first portable recorder according to the company. He then completed the system and invented the cassette in 1962.
“It’s so easy because the cassette was invented because of the annoyance of the current recorder,” Ottens said in an interview.
Cullen said that technology made portable tape players possible and filled the room of millions of teenagers with music.
Otens supervised and led a team that developed the prototype of the CD, later manufactured by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.
Since then, more than 200 billion CDs have been produced, the noted Philips.
