The trailer for Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape, 2016 The portable tape recorder followed in 1961, just ahead of the cassette. In 1956 he married Margo van Noord, and in 1960 became director of product development. He graduated from Delft Technical University in 1952, and took a job at the Philips factory in Hasselt, Belgium. During the Nazi occupation in the second world war, Lou built his family a radio to pick up the free Dutch Radio Oranje, complete with a directional antenna he called the “Germannenfilter” that could get around the Germans’ jamming of the signal. He was born in Bellingwolde, the Netherlands, where his parents, Frederika (nee Sievers) and Jan Ottens, were both teachers, but grew up in Hilversum after his father took a job directing the regional employment bureau. “It still hurts that we didn’t have one,” Ottens confessed. Ottens and Philips did a deal with Sony to jointly produce a standard cassette, but it was Sony who eventually created the Walkman, making playback of cassettes truly portable. Soon a raft of imitators, in many different formats, flooded the market. When the cassette made its debut at a Berlin trade fair in 1963, Japanese firms took extensive notes. The invention of the Sony Walkman in 1979 made cassette playback truly portable. Today the block would be on display at the Philips Museum, in Eindhoven, where in 2013 they staged a tribute on the 50th anniversary of the cassette, except that Ottens used the block to prop up a jack while changing a tyre, and left it behind on the roadside. Ottens described the cassette as a “breakthrough, because it was foolproof, and anyone could put it in their pocket”, and in fact all through the research process, Ottens carried a small block of wood in his jacket pocket – slightly smaller than a six-transistor radio, it reminded him of the portability he sought. Ottens’ tape had saved one of rock’s great songs.Īlthough Ottens could not quite eliminate the problems of drawing tape tight, cassette users discovered quickly that a six-sided pencil or Bic pen was a perfect tool to fix the tape safely in an instant. He fell asleep one night with the recorder on, and awoke to discover that, bookended by the sounds of his snoring, he had put the first version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on tape, though he had no memory of it. As it happened, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones used his Philips recorder for making demos. But another of their unforeseen benefits was the home recording of music. Ottens had thought cassettes might prove useful for business, in recording voice, and to hobbyists who wanted to record sound in the outdoors. Photograph: unomat/Getty Images/iStockphoto Boomboxes facilitated the recording of radio broadcasts and from one cassette deck to another, to create mix tapes.
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