Bowers & Wilkins traces its origins to 1966 in Worthing, England, when John Bowers — who had been hand-building speakers as a hobby out of the back of an electronics shop he ran with his friend Roy Wilkins — received an unexpected £10,000 bequest from Miss Knight, an elderly customer so taken with his speakers and his knowledge of classical music that she left him the funds to turn his hobby into a business. That same year produced the company's first loudspeaker, the P1, and B&W Loudspeakers Ltd was born.

What followed was decades of genuine engineering firsts: Kevlar cone material, introduced in the 1970s and famously used in the DM6 (nicknamed the "pregnant penguin"); the "tweeter-on-top" design that liberated high frequencies from cabinet resonance; and the original 801, which became a fixture at Abbey Road Studios in 1979 and set a new benchmark for studio monitor design. The 800 Series that followed remains the gold standard in professional and audiophile speakers to this day, while 1993's iconic Nautilus — its distinctive tapered-tube cabinet engineered to eliminate internal reflections entirely — remains one of the most recognisable speaker designs ever made.