Fawad Chaudhry has paid a rich tribute to Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who passed away in his hometown of Duizel last weekend.
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Responding to the news of his demise, the Minister for Science and Technology, in a tweet, said: “RIP Lou Ottens. You will be remembered as an iconic inventor.”
“Cassettes and CDs were part of our lives till 2008/2010,” said Chaudhry further, adding: “[The] inventor of cassette and later CD was the man who filled our lives with so many colours and sounds.”
According to details, the Dutch engineer who developed the cassette tape at Philips in 1963 died on Saturday at the age of 94.
Ottens joined Philips in 1952 and rose to become head of product development by 1960. He wanted to create a portable tape recorder because he “got annoyed with the clunky, user-unfriendly reel-to-reel system,” he explained years after he invented the cassette. His invention transformed the way people listened to music.
The Philips “compact cassette” was unveiled at a 1963 electronics fair in Berlin, boasting it was “smaller than a pack of cigarettes.” On the 50th anniversary of its creation, Ottens told Time magazine that it was a “sensation” from day one.
Later, Ottens struck a deal with Philips and Sony that saw his model confirmed as the patented cassette after a number of Japanese companies reproduced similar tapes in a number of sizes.
Ottens was also involved in the development of the compact disk, and more than 200 billion of those have been sold worldwide to date.
In 1982, when Philips showed off a production CD player, Ottens said: “From now on, the conventional record player is obsolete”.
He retired four years later. When asked about his career, he said his biggest regret was that Sony and not Philips had created the iconic cassette tape player, the Walkman.
