Project 365 day 291: my sixteenth birthday present

The audio cassette tapes and players were developed by a team led by Lou Ottens at Phillips in Belgium in 1963, and were on sale from 1964. They were cheap, portable and easy to use, so quickly superseded the more cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder (though as a language teacher I was still using reel-to-reel tapes for listening comprehension when I started teaching in the eighties). 

I have not managed to find out when the first combined radio cassette players were marketed, but mine, an ITT model with long and medium wave and FM frequencies, was a much treasured sixteenth birthday present in 1976. It has been in daily use ever since: although the cassette player failed a few years ago, it still lives on our kitchen counter, these days permanently tuned to BBC Radio 4. I love having things which have lasted most of a lifetime, and when I dug out the manual I rediscovered the service information, with complete wiring diagrams, which came with it. I wish today's electrical appliances came with the same expectation that they could be repaired.

Albums were released on cassette from the 1966, but I didn't buy any until I started listening in the car in the nineties. The attraction of the radio cassette recorder for me was that it enabled me to record the top 30 from radio 1 on Saturday afternoons or my favourite tracks from John Peel's or Anne Nightingale's shows; and even better, it meant I could use the five pin socket to connect it to the family record player and (illegally) copy my vinyl LPs to swap with my friends. My French penfriend received a very similar machine for her birthday the same year, and when we spent our second summer in each other's homes, I recorded Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for her; I still have her copies of Jean Ferrat, Alan Stivell and Georges Moustaki. My first boyfriend copied Genesis' Trick of the Tail and Supertramp's Crime of the Century for me, also still in the collection, and before I left for university in 1978 I copied all my own records onto cassette to take with me and compiled mix tapes of my favourite tracks. The cassette player also accompanied me for my undergraduate year in a Nantes flat share and postgraduate year in a Paris garret, and lived in all my student houses, with a gradually expanding collection of music. In 1984, after my first year with a proper salary, P and I carefully chose our hi-fi separates (also still in use, with the later addition of a CD player), and my cassette player became less important, but I'm still very attached to it. The lifespan of the magnetic tape in an audio cassette is supposedly ten to thirty years, but some of mine are over forty years old and I still listen to them occasionally on the eighties hi-fi.

Thank you Laurie54 for hosting Mono Monday in October on the theme of inventions - it's been fun.