Given its market domination from the moment it first appeared in 1979, many people might imagine that the Sony Walkman was the original personal cassette player. Its iconic status is beyond question—it all but created the vogue for listening to music on the move and is a direct antecedent of today's ubiquitous iPod. And yet seven years earlier, a lone inventor with little expertise in the field of electronics came up with a concept that was almost identical.
The story begins in Brazil in 1972 when a German- born former TV executive named Andreas Pavel(b. 1945) sought a way of listening to high-quality music while going about his everyday business. His idea was for a tiny portable cassette player—not that much larger than the cassette itself—that played back audio through a small pair of headphones. He called his novel idea the Stereobelt.
Having left Brazil and moved to Switzerland, Pavel made approaches to many of the leading electronic manufacturers, but none were interested in his idea: They believed that few would be prepared to wear headphones in public in order to listen to music. Although Pavel failed to find a backer for his idea, his faith was unshaken and, during 1977, he filed patents for his invention across the globe.
One year after Sony launched their renowned Walkman—to immediate acclaim—Pavel set out on what turned out to be a marathon legal battle taking up most of the next twenty-five years. It was eventually resolved in 2003, with an out-of-court settlement in which Sony is believed to have paid Pavel in excess of $10 million.
