Meet the Professor!

The name of the Edge range commemorates Professor Gordon Edge, who designed the very first product for Cambridge Audio Laboratories as the company began life as a division of Cambridge Consultants in 1968.

Professor Edge, who attended Brunel University and started his career with Pye in Cambridge, was one of those driven British engineers who overcame technological obstacles seemingly by sheer enthusiasm as much as engineering acumen. A later colleague John W Lewis described this as his ‘reality distortion field’, remembering one meeting where someone pointed out that Professor Edge’s latest suggestion “contravened several fundamental laws of physics. His response... ‘I don’t see why we should let that stand in our way...’”

This attitude may explain why that first Cambridge Audio integrated amplifier, the P40, was designed with such a low casing, a fine piece of industrial design to be sure, yet leaving the young engineers around him with quite a task to fit everything inside.

“You cooked up this iconic industrial design with Roy Gray from Woodhuysen Design in about 1968,” remembered Peter Lee in a commemoration after Edge’s passing in 2013. “It was only two inches high (in old money) and I remember the shiver as I contemplated getting a 90VA transformer in the box…”

That transformer was one of Edge’s innovations. Cambridge Audio claims the P40 as the first amplifier in the world to use a toroidal transformer, now a standard component inside virtually every high-end audio amplifier (the Edge W has two of them). And the P40 was indeed well-received — perhaps too well received, as it proved difficult to scale up production to meet demand. A fresh 2 x 25W P50 amplifier design was required to allow the growth that was clearly possible at the start of this golden era for hi-fi. By 1971, the required investment for still greater growth saw the company pass into the hands of CE Hammond & Co Ltd.

Professor Edge went on to other fields — wildly diverse fields, indeed, joining the engineering and science brains at Cambridge’s PA Consulting Group and later leaving there to form Scientific Generics, both problem-solving R&D organisations fostering innovation which included, according to his PA colleague John W Lewis, everything from inflatable bicycle seats to military optical devices, from jumping spider toys to biotechnology, from chocolate-coating machines to the UK’s first pay-phones, from telecoms networking to large-screen television projection systems. From these companies came so many spin-offs and entrepreneurial engineers that Edge is seen as playing a huge part in the city of Cambridge’s reputation as a hub for British technology and engineering.