The tribute took place on Friday after Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, credited with inventing the audio tape and helping to create the compact disc, died at the age of 94.
Created by Ottens while working for the electric giant Philips, the cassettes made music truly portable for the first time and allowed a generation of music fans to make mix-cassettes with their favorite songs.
Versatile, if extremely easy to wrap, over 100 billion cassettes were produced worldwide in their heyday, from the 1960s to the 1980s, and have even enjoyed a recent retro comeback.
“It saddened us all to hear about 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 on March 6 in the village of Duizel near the Belgian border, Philips said.
Born in 1926 in the Dutch town of Bellingwolde, Ottens showed an interest in technology at an early age during Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.
He built a radio to receive “free Dutch” Radio Orange with a special antenna he called “Germanenfilter” because it could avoid Nazi jammers, the 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 bulky drum-to-drum system that needed manual winding and invented the tape in 1962.
“The tape was invented out of irritation with the existing tape recorder, it’s so simple,” Ottens was quoted as saying by the NRC in an interview.
‘Wooden block’
The technology that made the portable cassette player possible and filled millions of teen bedrooms with music began in the humblest ways, Coolen said.
“During the development of the box, in the early 1960s, (Ottens) made a block of wood that would fit exactly in his coat pocket,” she added.
“This was how big the first compact tape should have been, making it much lighter than the bulky tape recorders used at the time.”
The historic prototype of the wooden block was “unfortunately lost when Lou used it to support his jack while changing a flat tire,” Coolen added.
Ottens then oversaw a team that developed the compact disc, which was then produced by Philips and Japanese electronics giant Sony.
Since then, more than 200 billion CDs have been produced, Philips said.
Once sent to the trash can of music history, the tapes enjoyed a late revival.
Sales of cassette albums in the US increased by 23% in 2018, according to the Nielsen Music tracker, from 178,000 copies in the previous year to 219,000.
Despite being the unknown hero of the music world, Ottens’ career was not without frustrations.
Sony released not only its first CD before Philips, but also the famous Walkman that transformed the way people listen to music – years later it said that “it still hurts that we didn’t have one”.
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