The tributes were released on Friday after Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, credited with inventing the audio tape and helping create the compact disc, died at the age of 94.
Created by Ottens while working for electric giant Philips, the cassettes made music portable for the first time and allowed a generation of music fans to make mix-covers of their favorite songs.
Versatile, though easily detachable, more than 100 billion cassette tapes were produced worldwide at their peak from the 1960s to the 1980s and have even enjoyed a recent retro resurgence.
“We were all saddened to learn of Lou Ottens’ passing,” Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, said in a statement to AFP.
“Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology, even though his inventions had humble beginnings.”
He died March 6 in the village of Duizel, near the Belgian border, Philips said.
Born in 1926 in the Dutch city of Bellingwolde, Ottens showed his interest in technology at an early age during the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany during World War II.
He built a radio to receive the “free Dutch” Orange Radio with a special antenna he called “Germanenfilter” because he could avoid Nazi jammers, Dutch newspaper NRC reported.
Ottens joined Philips after studying engineering at university, where he and his team developed the world’s first portable tape recorder, according to Philips.
But he became frustrated with the voluminous reel-to-reel system that needed manual winding and invented the cassette in 1962.
“Cassette tape was invented out of irritation over the existing tape recorder, it’s that simple,” Ottens said according to NRC in an interview.
‘Wooden block’
The technology that made the portable cassette player possible and that filled millions of teen rooms with music began in the most humble way, Coolen said.
“During the development of the cassette tape, in the early 1960s, (Ottens) made a wooden block that would fit exactly in the coat pocket,” he added.
“It was the big one that had to be the first compact cassette, which made it much more manageable than the bulky tape recorders that were in use at the time.”
The historic wooden block prototype was sadly lost when Lou used it to prop up his dog while changing a flat tire, ”added Coolen.
Ottens oversaw a team that developed the compact disc that was produced by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.
Since then, more than 200 billion CDs have been produced, Philips said.
Once consigned to the rubbish of music history, cassettes have been resurfacing lately.
According to tracker Nielsen Music, sales of cassette tapes in the United States grew 23% in 2018, from 178,000 copies the previous year to 219,000.
Despite being the unsung hero of the music world, Ottens ’career was not without frustrations.
Sony released not only their first CD before Philips, but also the famous Walkman that transformed the way people listen to music; years later he said that “it still hurts that we don’t have them.”
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