Sixty years ago, the compact audio cassette debuted at the German Radio Exhibition. Behind this innovation was Lou Ottens, a Dutch engineer who, the story goes, was home one night listening to music and grew frustrated with his reel-to-reel tape recorder.
So the head of product development for the Philips factory in Hasselt, Belgium, decided to design something that was cheaper, more mobile and easier to use. And he did, creating the world’s first compact cassette system, in which spools of magnetic recording tape were encased in a small plastic body. Instructions for the EL 3300 speak to Ottens’s early aims.
