Heartfelt tributes were rolled out on the news of the death of the renowned Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, who bagged the credit for inventing audio cassette tape and also assisting in creating compact disc. He passed away at the age of 94.

While Ottens was working for Philips, cassettes gave a portable option to music lovers for the first time and allowed a generation of music fans to create a series of mix-tapes of their favorite songs.

Cassettes were a versatile option as they were easy to unspool. More than 100 billion cassettes were produced worldwide from 1960 to 1980.

Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven, expresses her grief, stating that "Lou was an extraordinary man who loved technology, even as his inventions had humble beginnings." She further adds, "It saddened all of us to hear about Lou Ottens' passing."

Lou passed away on Mar 6th, in the village of Duizel near the Belgian border.

Lou Ottens was born in 1926 in the Dutch city of Bellingwolde. He always showed a great interest in technology since the time he was employed in Netherlands, under Nazi Germany in World War II.

In a report from Dutch newspaper NRC, it is stated that Lou built a radio to receive the “free Dutch” Radio Oranje, which was equipped with a special antenna which he called “Germane filter” as it could avoid Nazi jammers.

In a statement, Philips stated that before Ottens joined the company, he and his team developed the world's first portable tape recorder. They all were studying engineering at a university at that time. The bulky reel-to-reel system, based on the manual winding, frustrated Ottens so much that he landed up inventing the cassette in 1962.

He also quoted in one of the interviews of NRC, “The cassette tape was invented out of irritation about the existing tape recorder, it's that simple."

In one of Coolen’s statements, she states that the technology on which the portable cassette player was invented had filled the bedrooms of millions of teenagers with music worldwide. In 1960, while Ottens was developing the cassette tape, he (Ottens) made a wooden block that fitted in his coat’s pocket just like a cassette.

That’s how the first-ever compact cassette was invented, making it a lot easier to carry than the bulky tape recorders.

Coolen adds that “The historic wooden block prototype of the cassette” was sadly lost when Lou used it to prop his jacket while changing a flat tire. Otten supervised a team that developed compact disc as well, which was later produced by Philips and the Japanese electronics giant of all time, Sony.

Since then, more than 200 billion CDs have been produced, affirms Philips.