It's on tape

I still have a couple thousand audio cassettes around the house, as well as the equipment to record and play them. The technology is far from perfect, but I come from the days when we were thrilled to have a record player and if you liked a song, you had to go get the record of it.

Cassette recorders changed all that, and we have a man named Lou Ottens to thank for their creation.  He just died a couple of weeks ago at age 94, over in the Netherlands. Without him, our music was just a stack of records, but once he figured out how to put tiny tapes in a tiny shell, we had our mixtapes and playlists!

Yes, we had reel-to-reel tapes, but the word for them was clunky and large. I guess that's two words. But they were not so practical to carry to the beach, or to provide background music at a reception, and they needed to be threaded, and all that mishegas. I worked with reel tapes, and they were usually major PITAs (or PsITA). A nice cassette recorder, with some blank tapes and fresh batteries, you could record anything, from the sound of the seashore to your cousin's wedding, both of which got a little salty.

So it was that Ottens, head of new product development in Hasselt, Belgium, for the Dutch Philips technology company, set out to shrink those big reels in the 1960s. 

A man named Zack Taylor (not to be confused with the 12th US president) has made a movie about the cassette story, and he says, "Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible."

Besides coming up with the great idea, Ottens wanted his product to be inexpensive and accessible to all. To this end, he persuaded Philips to allow all other manufacturers to use cassette technology for free, which allowed the new format to go global in no time at all.  It's true, we are seeing huge corporations sharing work and information on the coronavirus vaccines, but not with too many other products. When video tape cassettes became the logical child of Ottens's audio tapes, two different formats, VHS and Betamax, vied for the top slot, which meant that a lot of the "special" tapes your buddy had in that box in back of his basement were not usable anymore, because they were Betamax and no one had a Betamax player. There went the viewing parties for "Saturday Nut Fever." 

My favorite part of the whole deal was that Ottens, in trying to create something that really didn't exist, came up with a wooden block that would fit into a pocket easily. He used the wooden chunk as his ruler to make sure that whatever he and his team devised would be that small. That was the key!

And Lou Ottens's creation, the compact cassette, came out in 1963 and revolutionized the world of sound duplication. And Ottens was quite unsentimental about his brainchild. Over the years to come, as over 100 Billion cassettes were made and sold worldwide, he devoted his time to working on compact discs, and stated publicly that cassettes were "primitive and prone to noise and distortion" - problems not found in digital CDs.

And I would love to show you the original piece of wood that he used as a yardstick for his invention, but he smashed it, using it as a leverage prop for his jack while changing a tire on his car.

I hope he was listening to "Free Bird" on a cassette while he changed that tire!