The Hague (AFP)

Numerous tributes were paid to Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, considered the inventor of the audio cassette and one of the designers of the compact disc on Friday after news of his death at the age of 94.

Created by Lou Ottens while working for Dutch electronics giant Philips, cassettes made music truly portable for the very first time and allowed a generation of music fans to create mixtapes - compilations - of their favorite songs.

Two-sided yet extremely easy to unroll, more than 100 billion cassettes were manufactured around the world at their peak, from the 1960s to the 1980s. They have seen a recent resurgence of interest.

"It saddened us all to learn of the death of Lou Ottens," responded Olga Coolen, director of the Philips museum in Eindhoven, in a statement sent to AFP.

"Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology even though his inventions had humble beginnings."

He died on March 6 in the village of Duizel, near the Belgian border, Philips said.

Born in 1926 in the Dutch town of Bellingwolde, Lou Ottens showed his interest in technology from an early age, when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany, during World War II.

He notably built a radio allowing him to receive the "free Dutch" radio Oranje, thanks to a special antenna which he called the "Germanenfilter" ("Filter of the Germans") because it made it possible to avoid the Nazi jammers, a reported the Dutch newspaper NRC.

Lou Ottens joined Philips after studying engineering at the university where he and his team developed the world's first portable tape recorder, the company says.

But he was quickly frustrated with the voluminous coil system, which required manual winding, so he invented the cassette in 1962.

"The tape was invented out of annoyance with the tape recorder that already existed, it's that simple," Lou Ottens, quoted by the NRC, said in an interview.

- "Wood block" -

The technology that made the portable cassette player possible and put music in millions of teenage rooms started in the most humble way possible, says Olga Coolen.

"During the development of the tape in the early 1960s, (Lou Ottens) had a wooden block made that fit exactly in his coat pocket."

"It was the size of the first compact cassette, which made it much more maneuverable than the bulky tape recorders used at the time," she adds.

Unfortunately, the first wooden block prototype was "lost when Lou used it to support his jack while changing a flat tire," says Coolen.

Lou Ottens then led a team that developed the compact disc, produced by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.

Over 200 billion CDs have been produced since.

Although they have been forgotten for a while, cassettes have recently seen a resurgence of interest.

The sales of albums on cassettes in the United States increased by 23% in 2018, according to the measurement organization of music sales Nielsen Music, from 178,000 copies the previous year to 219,000.

Lou Ottens' career has not been without frustrations.

Sony had not only released its first CD before Philips, but also the famous Walkman which transformed the way people listen to music - years later he still thought about it: "It still hurts that we don't have it. not had a ".

© 2021 AFP