First Cassette Tape

Inventor of the Cassette Tape

The Philips Company of the Netherlands invented and released the first compact audio-cassette in 1962. They used high-quality polyester 1/8-inch tape produced by BASF. Recording and playback was at a speed of 1.7/8 inches per second.

The next year in the U.S. sales began of the Norelco Carry-Corder dictation machine that used the new cassette tape. The consumer's demand for blank tape used for personal music-recording was unanticipated by Philips.
German inventor SeJoseph Begun was a pioneer in the field of magnetic recording.

A pioneer in the early history of magnetic tape recording, Semi Joseph Begun's advancements in the magnetic tape field eventually provided the 3M company with a billion dollar industry.
Joseph Begun graduated in 1929 from the Institute of Technology in Berlin, Germany, where he wrote an important research book entitled Magnetic Recording. In 1934/35, Begun built the world's first tape recorder used for broadcasting. He later created the first consumer tape recorder called the Sound Mirror (patents 2,048,487; 2,048,488).

Over the course of his career, Joseph Begun continued the development of sound recording media and improved the coating paper and ferromagnetic powders used with magnetic sound tape.

In his "History of Magnetic Recording" Semi Joseph Begun had this to say about his own contributions: Magnetic recording was improved in Germany after World War I.
In 1928, Kurt Stille formed the Echophone Company with Karl Bauer and contracted with Ferdinand Schuchard AG and its talented engineer Semi Joseph Begun to manufacture the Dailygraph, the first cassette magnetic recorder. Semi Joseph Begun also developed the Stahltone-Bandmaschine steel tape recorder in 1935 for mobile radio broadcasting

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She grew up on her parents' farm, outside the town, and went to the same one-room schoolhouse her mother had attended. This rural area of upstate New York, straddling Niagara and Erie Counties, had been hit hard by the Great Depression. The few industries the area enjoyed suffered frequent closures and layoffs. Farm families worked desperately hard to sustain meager subsistence. But young Joyce enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a precocious interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother gave her first typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college.

When she transferred to the high school in Lockport, she quickly distinguished herself. An excellent student, she contributed to her high school newspaper and won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she majored in English. When she was only 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Joyce Carol Oates was valedictorian of her graduating class. After receiving her BA degree. she earned her Master's in a single year at the University of Wisconsin. While studying in Wisconsin she met Raymond Smith. The two were married after a three-month courtship.

In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, Michigan. Joyce taught at the University of Detroit and had a front-row seat for the social turmoil engulfing America's cities in the 1960s. These violent realities informed much of her early fiction. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall was published when she was 28. Her novel them received the National Book Award.

In 1968, Joyce took a job at he University of Windsor, and the couple moved across the Detroit River to Windsor, in the Canadian province of Ontario. In the ten years that followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books at the extraordinary rate of two or three per year, while teaching full-time. Many of her novels sold well; her short stories and critical essays solidified her reputation. Despite some critical grumbling about her phenomenal productivity, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States though only in her thirties.

While still in Canada, Oates and her husband started a small press and began to publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. They continued these activities after 1978, when they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University. Her literary work continued unabated.
In the early 1980s, Oates surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefluer, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to reimagine whole stretches of American history. Just as suddenly, she returned, at the end of the decade, to her familiar realistic ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. The novels Solstice and Marya: A Life, also date from this period, and use the materials of her family and childhood to create moving studies of the female experience. In addition to her literary fiction, she has written a series of experimental suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.
As of this writing, Joyce Carol Oates has written 56 novels, over 30 collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, plays, innumerable essays and book reviews, as well as longer nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of the gothic and horror genres, and on such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson. In 1996, Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for "a lifetime of literary achievement."
Her husband, Raymond Smith, died in 2008, shortly before the publication of her 32nd collection of short stories, Dear Husband. Today, Joyce Carol Oates continues to live and write in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.