Tale of the tape
With the passing of Lou Ottens, World Beat reflects on the music format that changed everything
published : 30 Mar 2021 at 04:00
Lou Ottens, inventor of the humble cassette tape, died on March 11. He was 94. Ottens was a Dutch design engineer who worked as a product development officer for Philips. Before the cassette tape, he created the company’s first portable tape recorder (reel-to-reel) and it was his irritation with the lack portability and clumsiness of reel-to-reel tape recorders that led him onto a path to the cassette tape. From 1963 to the late 1980s, 100 billion cassette tapes were sold.
The cassette version of Malian diva Oumou…