Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anatoch Shinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray,

James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite

facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Andy.

My fact is that the prototype personal cassette player was a block of wood which the inventor

carried around in his pocket to make sure it would fit.

That was it, he just wanted something, he wanted to make sure that it would be the right

size and so he did it at the simplest way possible.

So when you say prototype, he didn't think it was making any noise or anything.

I remember when I was in the school orchestra and primary school I was on the wooden block

so you know that is a really to instrument, isn't it?

It is an instrument.

Yeah, that was the very early prototype, the idea.

That was the only song you could play, the wooden block parts of children's songs.

Yeah, it was a really early prototype and then he works on it a lot before it became the

Walkman, he was called Lou Ottens, this guy and he passed away a couple of weeks ago,

aged 94 and in his working life he worked at Phillips, the electronics firm and he was

the head of research and development.

So in the 1950s he started working on an alternative for the huge tape recorders that you had at

the time and he had this block made in the 60s to show him how big the first compact

...