Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus
The loudspeaker shaped like a shell, in which the sound going backwards dies away in tapering tubes.
The engineer Laurence Dickie worked for five years on a loudspeaker without a box. The sound going backwards from each driver is led into a tapering tube where it dies away, instead of bouncing around a box and interfering.
For the bass the tube became so long that it had to be coiled like a shell. The form followed from the acoustics, but the result is one of the most sculptural loudspeakers ever made.
Materials: Glass-reinforced plastic, aluminium drivers
Manufacture: Made by Bowers & Wilkins in Worthing from 1993, by hand and in small numbers.
The shell in which the bass tube coils up behind.
The small spheres for midrange and treble.
The long, tapering tubes behind each driver.