> Inventor of the cassette, Lou Ottens, passes

“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email. Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time. “The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.” The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mixtapes of songs that expressed their feelings.

It’s not often that we stop to think about the small things that have huge impacts on our lives until something happens. This is one of those things and this is one of those times. It’s also amazing when these things happen and we find out the story as to why or how they were created. I can’t imagine life without cassettes and like most of the things that push our world forward they were created out of a frustration with the status quo.

Cassettes were such a huge part of my youth. Even though I had records as a small child, the very first music I owned was on a cassette. That continued well throughout my teens and maybe even into my early twenties. It’s how I collected music. Not just in the albums I bought, but with recording songs I loved from the radio. Later with dual cassette decks from tape to tape. If I remember correctly, my very first “adult” cassette was the Thompson Twins album “Into the Gap”. I was in the third grade and my grandparents bought it for me along with my very first boom box.

After that it was my first Sony Walkman and the rest is, well, history. Everything I owned until I hit highschool was most likely on cassette. Even though at that point I had started to buy some things on CDs, which Lou also helped create, the bulk of my listening was on cassettes because portable CD players were incredibly expensive at the time.

The thing I think I’ll always remember cassettes for though will always be the mix tape. Especially the ones we made for girlfriends or girls we were hoping to make our girlfriends. While playlists do carry a similar vibe, there was definitely an art to making a mix tape playlists just dont have.

The irony in all this is that a lot of my younger friends will probably have a similar reverence for their iPods, downloading MP3s to it, and making those playlists like my generation does for cassette tapes and the walkman. There is definitely a generational echo here.

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