Cassette Tapes - Communication Technology

Before Airpods and Beats, the world was taken by storm by the creation of cassette tapes, an invention created for home recordings and dictation, which later had a bigger impact in the audio world. In 1935, reel-to-reel recording tapes were invented. At the time of their invention, they were only used in large recording studios and radio stations. In their early years, they were so large, they took up the length of an entire table, making them much less desirable as they would be in their prime. Following the first versions of the cassette tape, in 1958, the first reversible cassette tape was released, with a much smaller size (about the size of a typical video cassette). Though people never paid it too much attention, it began to pave  the way for the newer versions of the technology. In 1962, the first compact audio cassette was invented by Lou Ottens and his team at Phillips Technology Company. These cassettes became the standard for this invention and ultimately began licensing their format for free. Lou Ottens created the Phillips cassettes as a way to solve the problem of high quality audio without the clunkiness and expensive nature of the reel-to-reel tapes. In the following years, many new variations of this technology surfaced, allowing cassette tapes to become a household object, and later being the most widely supported and used audio platform until the invention of the CD nearly three decades later. In 1968, Cassette tapes took the world by storm, and shortly after in the 1970s, they were placed into cars for audio on the road. In 2001, they lost out to CDs, but later resurged in 2017 with “hipsters” and true nostalgics wanting to relive the cassette ages.

Though cassette tapes seemed to be a relatively simple invention, their creation revolutionized the world of music and audio forever. Their affordability and convenience changed the world of audio, allowing the average person to conveniently listen to music and audios on the go whenever they pleased. Though the original intent of cassettes was for dictation and home recordings, the wave of cassette tapes created a movement in the world of audio and music. Cassette tapes also paved the way for new technology in unexpected places, such as journalism, sermons, university lectures, and reading. The wave of cassettes allowed for journalists to take notes in a more efficient way, allowed for political and religious sermons as well as lectures to be recorded, and it created an outlet for the new world of audio books, as books began to be recorded by voice actors. Cassettes began to be applied in so many different areas, that even before the invention of voicemail systems, cassettes were being used as the first answering machines in technological history. Beyond the realm of technological advances, cassettes fulfilled a societal role, creating the concept of “Cassette Culture”, ultimately bringing together a nation through music. Cassette Culture allowed for people to swap mixtapes filled with their favorite collections of songs, bootlegging started to surface, along with artists being allowed to create music without a label. Cassette tapes are arguably the first form of technology to give individuals their freedom of expression through music, by allowing for open communication by recording and swapping.