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Audio Cassette Inventor Lou Ottens

Here's a You Tube video from Techmoan about the history of the development of cassette tapes:

And another one on the RCA cartridge that Frank mentioned:
 
Did you know the compact cassette was not the first? Read on!
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Elcaset was a proprietary Sony format that came and went in the late 1970s. The Philips cassette had already been on the market for about 12 years and was well established by that time. The usual record industry FUD about higher fidelity potentially leading to copywrong infringement et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is often cited as its reason for failure. The bigger reason was the consumer tape market was simply becoming oversaturated with incompatible formats. Reel-to-reel, 8-track and Philips cassette were dominant then, Muntz 4-track was mostly dead though there was still limited legacy usage, and record labels balked at the idea of supporting yet another tape format on top of what was already out there. One of the same reasons (amongst many) why Philips' DCC became stillborn just over a decade later.

As far as I know, this is the original tape "cassette."
Click to expand...

The obscure Lowe Optaphon system appeared in Germany about the same time as Bernard Cousino's "Echomatic" endless loop cart earlier in the 1950s, several years before the RCA cart. Optaphon was quite literally a full-size 1/4" reel-to-reel tape permanently mounted in a cartridge-like housing, sort of like 3M's later Cantata format but with reels side-by-side rather than stacked. Still, cartridge-loaded tapes were not a new idea when RCA's format first appeared.
 
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