Lou Ottens

Lodewijk Frederik Ottens (21 June 1926 – 6 March 2021) was a Dutch engineer and inventor, best known as the inventor of the cassette tape, and for his work in helping to develop the compact disc.

Ottens was employed by Philips for the entirety of his career.

Ottens was born in Bellingwolde on 21 June 1926.

Ottens showed an interest in technology and tinkering from an early age.

While in his teens, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, he constructed a radio that he would use to secretly listen to Radio Oranje broadcasts.

In order to avoid Nazi German jammers, Ottens constructed the radio with a primitive directional antenna.

After the war, Ottens began attending the Delft University of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering.

While attending university, Ottens worked part time as a drafting technician for an X-ray technology factory.

He graduated in 1952.

In 1952, Ottens was hired by Philips.

He started in the mechanization department of the Main Industry Group in Eindhoven.

In 1957, he transferred to a newly opened Philips factory in Hasselt, Belgium.

At the time, this factory mainly produced audio equipment, including turntables, tape recorders, and loudspeakers.

In 1960, Ottens became the head of the new product development department in Hasselt.

While in this position, he led the development of Philips' first portable tape recorder, the EL 3585.

This project proved to be quite successful, with over 1 million units being sold.

Building on the success of the EL 3585, Philips Hasselt started working on plans to develop a portable cassette recorder.

The goal for this "pocket recorder," as it was nicknamed, was to be inexpensive and small, with low battery consumption but reasonable sound quality.

Originally, Philips planned on working with RCA and using their RCA tape cartridge system cassette, but Ottens found that the dimensions and tape speed of the set made it not suitable for their desired product.

Philips eventually decided to develop their own cassette, with RCA's cassette as a starting point.

Ottens started the design of the cassette by cutting a block of wood to fit into his jacket pocket.

This wood block would become the model for what became the first portable cassette recorder, the EL 3300.

Ottens managed a team of ten or twelve workers who had experience in designing gramophones and tape recorders to develop the cassette and its equipment.

While developing the cassette, the group often utilized resources and knowledge from the nearby Eindhoven location.

In 1963, Philips decided to publicly introduce the cassette system at IFA Berlin.

This introduction was not immediately very widely received and did not spark much interest among those in the audio world.

However, some photos were taken of the system, which would later be used in the production of Japanese copies of Ottens' system, which were notably larger in size than the original.

Wilhelmus F.A. Heylands (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3801035A/en), a Dutch civil engineer and inventor in Ottens' team at Philips Hasselt, who graduated from TH Aachen (Germany), often explained that the reason for Philips' breakthrough with the Compact Cassette, was the fact that they offered this patent and invention for free to other manufacturers of similar hardware such as National and Sony.

Without this, the Compact Cassette would have never become the world standard.

Heylands was born on the same day as Lou Ottens.

In 1969, Ottens became Director of Philips Hasselt.

Under his directions, the Hasselt factory would focus primarily on producing Philips cassette systems, with the popularity of general compact cassettes growing.

With a growing demand for compact cassettes, Philips Hasselts grew larger, reaching an employee count of over 5000.

In 1972, Ottens became technical director of Philips Main Industry Group Audio.

While in this position, Ottens realized that laser technology being researched in the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (NatLab) for video records could also be used to make improvements in the field of audio.

With contactless laser readout for audio, the issue of wear and tear that was common with vinyl records and tapes would no longer be a problem.

The requirements and implementation of this technology to audio differed greatly from video, and research for this technology was split into two projects: Video Long Play and Audio Long Play.

The development of the Audio Long Play, or ALP, required major changes in design when compared to the Video Long Play.

The VLP, being the size of an LP, had space for 48 hours of music.

However, Ottens recognized that this was not a practical amount of playing time, and in 1972, he commissioned technicians to start testing with smaller discs.