盒式磁带发明者奥滕斯去世|其他外刊
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: The inventor of the audio cassette tape has died. Dutch engineer Lou Ottens was 94.
主持人阿里:夏皮罗:录音带的发明者去世,荷兰工程师卢.奥滕斯享年94岁。
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Let's rewind to the days before Ottens' creation.
主持人玛丽.路易丝: 凯利:让我们回到奥滕斯发明录音带之前的日子。
Audio tape was a beast to deal v h. It was recorded a d played on open reels of spinning quarter-inch tape, tape that would have to be threaded ever so carefully through an array of little cylinders.
录音带可真难处理,声音被记录下来,并在四分之一 英寸胶带上,胶带必须非非常小心地穿过一排小圆筒。
No wonder the average consumer never fancied it.
难怪普通消费者从不喜欢它。
SHAPIRO: Well, in the early 1960s, Lou Ottens was head of product development for the electronics company Philips.
夏皮罗:嗯,在20世纪60年代早期,卢奥滕斯是电子公司飞利浦产品开发部的负责人。
ZACK TAYLOR: He was a very tall guy.
扎克泰勒:他很高。
SHAPIRO: Zack Taylor met Ottens while making his film,"Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape."
夏皮罗:扎克.泰勒拍摄奥勝获斯的电影《卡带:纪录片混音带》时认识他的。
TAYLOR: I swear in his prime, he must have been 7 feet tall. He towered over me even when he was in his 90s. But he had big hands. He was kind of a klutz.
泰勒:我发誓在他的巅峰时期,他一定有7英尺高。即使他已经90多岁了,他也比我高。 但是他有一双大手,有点笨手笨脚。
The legend of the cassette is that the cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man.
盒式磁带的传说是,盒式磁带出自一个非常聪明的人的笨拙。
KELLY: And that very clever man led to a revolution in how we listen to music and share it.
凯利:这个非常聪明的人在我们听音乐和分享音乐的方式上引发了一场革命。
TAYLOR: Lou's thing was he wanted it to be easy and he wanted it to fit in his jacket pocket.
泰勒:卢想让录音带变得简单,想让它能装进他的夹克口袋里。
KELLY: The compact cassette was unveiled in Berlin in 1963.
凯利:紧凑型盒式磁带是1963年在柏林问世。
Ottens told Time magazine it was a sensation from the start, but he was humble about his contribution.
奥滕斯在接受时代》杂志采访时表示,这从一开始就引起了轰动,但他对自己的贡献很谦虚。
Here's how he put it in the documentary.
以下是他在纪录片中的说法。
LOU OTTENS: I can be credited for the idea and a number of ideas in it, but the draftsmen, the electrical designers and the industrial designer, they have done the work.
卢.奥滕斯:这个想法和其中的很多想法都是我的功劳,但是绘图员、电气设计师和工业设计师已经完成了工作。
SHAPIRO: For a generation of people who grew up making their own mixtapes on cassettes, the invention was nothing short of genius.
夏皮罗:对于从小就自己录制混音磁带的一代人来说,这项发明简直是天才。
But Ottens himself was never satisfied with the low fidelity of audiocassettes.
但奥滕斯自己却从不满足于低保真度的磁带。
He described them as primitive and prone to noise and distortion.
他说它们很原始,容易产生噪音和扭曲。
Later, he turned his attention to developing compact disc technology.
后来,他把注意力转向了发展光盘技术。
Still, filmmaker Zack Taylor says Ottens did eventually see what the cassette had brought to others.
尽管如此,电影制作人扎克.泰勒表示,奥滕斯最终还是看到了这盘录音带带给别人的东西。
TAYLOR: Lou finally started to understand the emotional quotient, the sentimentality, the power that cassettes have to the individual.
泰勒:卢终于开始明白了录像带对个人的情商、感情和力量的影响。
It toke him 50 years, but when he left us, he finally understood.
他花了50年时间,但当他离开我们时, 他终于明白了。
KELLY: Zack Taylor talking about the man who dreamed up the audio cassette. Lou Ottens died over the weekend in his native country, the Netherlands.
凯莉:扎克.泰勒在谈论发明录音带的人,卢.奥滕斯周末在他的祖国荷兰去世。
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
(音乐摘录)