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The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.
The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.
Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.
As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.
Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.
As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
416 pages, ebook
First published May 8, 2018
About the author
Simon Winchester
95 books2,099 followersSimon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.
In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.
Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.
Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Whichester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Winchester's latest book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, was released March 11, 2011.
- source Wikipedia
In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.
Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.
Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Whichester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Winchester's latest book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, was released March 11, 2011.
- source Wikipedia
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October 2, 2020
Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.But we will certainly give it our best shot.
“Where did we come from?” is not only a religious question. It is also question of history. Simon Winchester is always a most welcome Virgil escorting us through the circles of historical knowledge, illuminating the unknown, or only slightly suspected, with the light of his explorer’s torch. We have trailed him on some of his many prior journeys. In Pacific, Atlantic, and Krakatoa, he looked at geographic places, some of the important events that have occurred there and how those events have affected the world. The Man Who Loved China may have focused on an individual, but its content had to do, again, with a place and how events that occurred there resonated forward. The Map That Changed the World and The Professor and the Madman concern themselves with particular steps in the growth of human knowledge. While having place as a factor, geographic place was not, per se, a focus. The Map concerned an inspiration to the understanding of Geology and The Professor and the Madman concerned the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Perfectionists falls into this latter camp. Winchester looks at a select group of advances in the art of precision over the last several centuries, and shows how those advances impacted the world of their time, and helped create the one we live in now. It is a cornucopia of interesting historical and scientific detail and insight. One might say that The Perfectionists is comprised of diverse parts that have been finely milled to work perfectly together. I wouldn’t, but one might.
Simon Winchester - image from The Berkshire Eagle
It is not surprising that Winchester tilts toward things mechanical. His father was an engineer, who inspired his son with his love for the beauty of well-made things. More specifically, he was encouraged in pursuing the particular notion of this book by a fan who urged him to write about a subject that was hidden in plain sight, but was a cornerstone of civilization, precision, and so he did.
The first Royce (before Rolls) – 1904 - image from Rolls Royce Enthusiasts Club
Winchester takes on a handful of specific tech/product areas, and examines where particular levels of advancement in precision have re-made them. These include clocks, the steam engine, machine tools, weapons (specifically cannons and rifles), automobiles, jet engines, lenses, GPS, locks and maybe most importantly, metrics themselves. Each trip down memory lane is fascinating and revelatory in its own way. There is a theme here that while precision is wonderful in hand-crafted products, it is the easy replicability of that precision that has allowed boutique technical upgrades to become world-spanning and revolutionary. The author allows for some sidetrips here and there to events and objects that were more narrowly focused.
Henry Royce and Charles Rolls - image from AutomotiveHistory.com
But the title of the book is The Perfectionists not The Perfections. For each technological breakthrough Winchester examines, there is a person responsible for the work, some one individual who persisted, despite discouragement that often lasted for many years, holding to his core vision until reaching the Voila! of success. Of course, there were a few who seemed to come by their triumphs much more easily. We grudgingly recognize them with a fine, whatever. And, of course, others whose inspiration proved beneficial to mankind, but for which they received little or no reward. The strong personalities of the men described here shine through, for good or ill. Not all of them would make for pleasant company. A household-name inventor is revealed as a notorious con man.
This cheerful sort is John Wilkinson - inventor of a boring machine (not that sort of boring) that is considered the first machine tool (or would that be Megatron?)
There are core questions that underlie all our technology, queries we do not think about at all. But that is because someone, or many someones, thought of them long ago, and sought answers. For example, keeping proper time is at the core of pretty much everything. Even operations that focus on other physical measurements have time as part of the equation. How do we measure time? How long is a second, and who gets to decide? How can you know your timepiece is accurate, and what is the significance of that to determining where you are, during, say, the 18th century? How long is a meter? How was that core metric arrived at? What was measured, and what arbitrary decisions went into establishing what a meter is based on? What is the significance of flatness on industrial production? What is the importance of tolerance in manufacturing? How did the first notion of a GPS system come about?
Sir Joseph Whitworth designed a method for manufacturing rifles to one-millionth of an inch accuracy. The Whitworth Rifle is considered the first sniper rifle. - image from ArtUK.org
There is a fascinating chapter that compares and contrasts two Henrys, Ford and Royce, and follows their similar early lives, and subsequent diversion of approach to making the best automobiles they could. Winchester also looks at the development of the world’s most accurate lenses, (including those in orbit) and how their diverse limitations (and sometimes significant flaws) were addressed. He offers a chapter on the tools used for making modern computer chips. Another begins with the explosion, in flight, of a jet engine, and proceeds to look at not only the history of the jet engine, but how it is constructed, and how this one literally flew to pieces. And there are some lesser items as well, like an explanation for why New England rifles tended to be longer than rifles from elsewhere, and how Royce got Rolled, and what The Dark Side refers to in the development of technology. (No, Luke, not that.)
Frank Whittle, an English pilot and engineer, patented a design for a turbojet engine in 1930 – image from Wikipedia
Winchester has a droll sense of humor, which is applied sparingly, but sometimes to great effect. In one instance, he describes a place being used for the testing of experimental jet engines
[the engine] was taken by truck to the Gloster test airfield near the Cotswold village of Brockworth, a town better known today for its annual midsummer cheese-rolling contest, when drunken locals try to pursue a huge round cheese as it is set thundering down a local hill.I will now always associate jet engines with inebriated English townies chasing giant wheels of cheese over hill and dale. The chapter also includes a wonderfully dry report, by one of the principals, of staff involved in an experiment desperately fleeing for their lives as the engine in question, it is clear, is about to explode. ROFL material, well, for me, anyway.
Roger Lee Easton (third from left) with astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ken Mattingly, Ronald Evans, Robert Crippen and Joseph Kerwin at the Naval Research Laboratory in 1975) is generally credited as the inventor of what is now called the GPS system – image from CollectSpace.com
He looks at the ever-increasing demands for precision in our increasingly high-tech tools, and what that means for actual human production of things. Luddites are mentioned, of course, as players in the Industrial Revolution. With the increasing automation of production, can the externalization of human labor that it entails generate another such movement?
Gripes are few here. Mainly, I wished that there were more and better illustrations of the technical designs Winchester writes about. And occasionally there are passages that seemed a bit too geared for technical minds.
The tools held on the slide rest can then be moved across the path of travel dictated by the leadscrew, thereby allowing the tools to make holes in the workpiece, or to chamfer it or (in due course, once milling had been invented, a process of related in the next chapter) mill it or otherwise shape it to the degree that the lathe operator demands.Ummmm…huh? Really, there are very few of these.
Kintaro Hattori - the founder of Seiko revolutionized timekeeping with the introduction of the quartz watch
You will learn all sorts of things in The Perfectionists, and you will gain a much greater understanding of how the industrial revolution began, and advanced, an appreciation for some of the core concepts of manufacturing at a large scale, and a sense of wonder at how some of the magic that passes for science today actually works. You will also get to know some names that should be common knowledge, but have faded from familiarity with time. I am not sure that The Perfectionists will be snapped up by a broad readership. But for any with an interest in engineering, in the history of industrial and scientific advancement, and in the history of technology, it is nothing less than mother’s milk.
James Clerk Maxwell - In 1870, this Scottish physicist proposed that standard measures be changed to being based on entirely new underlying, measurable and constant scientific truths
The parts to his book have been perfectly measured, and fit together well within the allowable tolerance. If someone were to say that Simon Winchester has written a book that is educational, entertaining, and constitutes extremely well milled brain candy, there could be only one possible response. “Precisely.”
Publication
-----May 8, 2018 - Hardcover
-----May 5, 2020 - Trade Paperback
Review posted – April 20, 2018
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
A nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found here
Reviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read:
-----Pacific
-----The Man Who Loved China
-----Atlantic
-----Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
-----The Map That Changed the World
-----The Professor and the Madman
Items of Interest
----- February 7, 2020 - NY Times - Boeing Starliner Flight’s Flaws Show ‘Fundamental Problem,’ NASA Says - by Kenneth Chang - pointing out the dangers of increasing complexity
-----August 18, 2020 - NY Times - America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them by Alanna Mitchell - Who knew?
June 13, 2018
Simon Winchester and I usually make a good pair. I like his topics and his narrative style. Truth be told, if I had real writer’s talent, I would love to have the freedom to roam the world writing about the fascinating things that our world contains and that people do. To that extent, I envy the author.
Here, Winchester is discussing a matter dear to his heart, “how precision engineers created the modern world.” This is so because Winchester’s own father was one of this group.
Words that are key to this book include “accuracy,” “precision,” and “tolerance.” In fact, a discussion of these terms precedes Winchester’s panorama of devices, which he puts in order of tolerance.
I found that his joy and fascination drove this book, much to my delight. Each device and its significance was a teachable moment and I was an apt student.
From the canon to the steam engine to Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory the stories behind the devices were eye-opening and entertaining.
Winchester does a fine job of placing the engineering feats within a historical context. He doesn’t ignore the effects on culture and society, including the workers displaced by machines. In fact, he questions whether our ability to create precise devices demands manufacturing and inspection techniques that are beyond human skills.
Finally, I learned about “flatness.” It is one of the most important concepts and I will leave it to you to discover why.
PS: In finishing Winchester's book, one thought has been coalescing in my mind. If or when a massive catastrophic event affects our species, it is likely that all the centuries of work chronicled in this book will be lost or, at least, humankind will be stuck with many precision devices but not the people or the tools or the science to keep them working. To what level will we fall back?
Here, Winchester is discussing a matter dear to his heart, “how precision engineers created the modern world.” This is so because Winchester’s own father was one of this group.
Words that are key to this book include “accuracy,” “precision,” and “tolerance.” In fact, a discussion of these terms precedes Winchester’s panorama of devices, which he puts in order of tolerance.
I found that his joy and fascination drove this book, much to my delight. Each device and its significance was a teachable moment and I was an apt student.
From the canon to the steam engine to Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory the stories behind the devices were eye-opening and entertaining.
Winchester does a fine job of placing the engineering feats within a historical context. He doesn’t ignore the effects on culture and society, including the workers displaced by machines. In fact, he questions whether our ability to create precise devices demands manufacturing and inspection techniques that are beyond human skills.
Finally, I learned about “flatness.” It is one of the most important concepts and I will leave it to you to discover why.
PS: In finishing Winchester's book, one thought has been coalescing in my mind. If or when a massive catastrophic event affects our species, it is likely that all the centuries of work chronicled in this book will be lost or, at least, humankind will be stuck with many precision devices but not the people or the tools or the science to keep them working. To what level will we fall back?
January 17, 2020
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
Fine quotation from Bertold Brecht to set the mood for a popular science tome. I really came with high hopes to this history of precision work, but I walked out with (mostly) empty hands. I would have been more informed on the subject by browsing wikipedia for a couple of hours than by reading this rambling and often off-topic attempt by Simon Winchester. This is my first read from his output, but I have often heard his name referenced as one of the very best researchers and narrators on a given theme. That might be so, on history or geography or something else, but for me he is clueless about engineering.
Winchester actually blew it right from the prologue, with his attempt to tell a personal story about his father bringing home a box of gauge blocks from his office and doing a kind of magic trick of metal bonding. All fine and dandy, except for the fact that gauge blocks are finely machined on two sides, and not on six, and they should be handled with cotton gloves and not touch skin directly, as even transpiration can lead to corrosion, measuring errors and eventually ruin of a very expensive equipment. It’s not a toy for children. I happen to know this, and a lot more on the subject, as I worked for more than two decades in the field of precision mechanical repairs and metrology, with the last three years as a trainer in industrial skills both in the metric and in the imperial system. And, frankly, I could not use this book in the classroom in any capacity, except for amusing trivia related to the history of the progress of technology.
Even this history smells fishy in the account by Winchester, who seems to go to great lengths to rewrite it in favour of British and American entrepreneurs, dismissing previous concepts and implementations from other countries in footnotes or brief paragraphs that grudgingly mentions some French or German or Russian inventor. I had numerous examples bookmarked, but one of the most egregious is Pierre Vernier, a staple of every serious mechanical workshop who barely merits two lines in a seven hundred pages book on precision.
By far the most annoying aspect of the book is the pay-to-play scheme where the author’s sponsors (Rolls-Royce, Ford, Boeing, Microsoft, Leica, Seiko, etc) get dozens of pages of unrelated history of the company and of its products, while the actual precision aspect discussed in the chapter is once again dismissed in a couple of barely stitched together paragraphs. For example, the chapter on car engines discusses everything related to Rolls-Royce and Ford and production-line increase in productivity, while giving the impression that all parts need to be manufactured to the same high standards of precision. In fact, only three or four components in that engine are very high tolerance. To make all of them with the same precision would drive the price up to exorbitant values. Not to mention the fact that key concepts like tolerance and traceability are introduced abruptly and used indiscriminately in places where they don’t apply.
In any case, each chapter starts with good intentions of introducing progressively more precise measurements, not only of length or shape, but also of time, weight, optics (probably my favorite in the book). Very soon though, the authors returns to his penchant for praising the sponsors instead of discussing the key aspects of technology, dedicating almost 9 out of any 10 pages to company history and trivia, a result probably of his visits to said centers of industry where he found these historical aspects more interesting than the engineering ones. This is quite obvious in the numerous footnotes who refer not to the subject of the chapter, but to unrelated facts about the founders of these companies.
I had similar notes about detours and mis-atributions in the chapter on jet propulsion where no mention is made of one of the pioneers in the field, a Romanian named Henri Coanda, or of the German efforts predating those of Frank Wittle, lionized here by Winchester. The actual relevant precision information (numeric control centers) is again resumed to only a couple of pages out of 50 filled with irrelevant trivia. I would have been extremely interested to read more about electrical discharge machining (EDM) used to obtain high precision jet engine parts, but they are only named in passing.
The structure of the chapters if forced to comply with an artificial scale of increased precision, which leads to some curious decisions of, for example discussing jet engine failure and the importance of blades with less than a thousandth of a millimeter tolerance, when the actual error was a half-millimeter off-center hole in a pipeline. Once again, the author fails to visualize the difference in tolerance between various parts of an engine. Not all of them could be designed to the same high standards.
Later chapters, discussing optics and electronics instead of mechanical workshops are a bit more tolerable, although still filled with off-topic trivia or improbable anecdotes like the one about enhancing a magazine photo to impossible levels of detail, given the normal resolution of an industrial printer (I am also a photographer, not only a mechanical engineer). Probably the author wanted something similar to the movie Blow-Up and made up a story to match. Nevertheless, the chapter of lenses for astronomy and its related interference pattern measurement units was probably the best in the present book. Actually, we have used interference patterns for the most precise surfaces in mechanical seals for refinery in one of my previous jobs.
The chapter on GPS and atomic clocks also had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the discussion is focused on military trivia and GPS history instead of explaining how atomic clocks are built. The chapter about miniaturization of transistors and the machines used for it is also interesting, with the usual filler pages and sponsored company references.
On the plus side, in the conclusion there are some good observations about the need to preserve artisan traditions in an industrial world dominated by automation. On the minus side, the end chapter on the International System of Units is still trying to prove the English and not the French invented the system.
Oh, well! For somebody who works in the field of precision this book is a waste of time. For general information purposes, it has its merits. I might read some other books by Winchester in the future, probably the one about the Atlantic, provided he doesn’t try to explain technology to me.
January 9, 2023
Well. That was a trip.
Specifically, through the making of our modern world that too many people take unthinkingly for granted, the creation of the ambit of the possible. The real changes, from which most political change so unknowingly flows.
The structure, for this discursive but ultimately highly cohering narrative, is pretty brilliant. Winchester frames it upon the progression of precision from tenths of an inch through to measures that can only be expressed in scientific notation, from the start of the industrial revolution through to the Hubble and cesium clocks, stitching together the human roots and technological results. Causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that if you follow any technology or device, no matter how rarefied, far enough back through all the steps of its creation, you always arrive at the base of its mechanical family tree at fleshly human hands and eyes, moving and making. This books shows both.
As the daughter of a safety engineer, and a long-time sci-tech reader, in a dim fannish way, there was from time to time happy recognition of some of the points and stories covered (such as the probable-cause investigations) at least enough to make me feel I wasn’t drowning; other parts were entirely new. Which reminds me also of my other reflection, that a good teacher makes you feel they’re smart, but a great teacher makes you feel you’re smart. There was some of this sense, but mostly of the feeling that I really need to go read more nonfiction. The pages-long bibliography in this is well worth a study.
Also, it finally gave me the proper definition of the term “machine tool”, which I’d blipped over all my life. I hope that’s not the only takeaway – my memory is a sieve, and the book was dense – but still, gratifying.
Highly recommended.
Ta, L.
Specifically, through the making of our modern world that too many people take unthinkingly for granted, the creation of the ambit of the possible. The real changes, from which most political change so unknowingly flows.
The structure, for this discursive but ultimately highly cohering narrative, is pretty brilliant. Winchester frames it upon the progression of precision from tenths of an inch through to measures that can only be expressed in scientific notation, from the start of the industrial revolution through to the Hubble and cesium clocks, stitching together the human roots and technological results. Causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that if you follow any technology or device, no matter how rarefied, far enough back through all the steps of its creation, you always arrive at the base of its mechanical family tree at fleshly human hands and eyes, moving and making. This books shows both.
As the daughter of a safety engineer, and a long-time sci-tech reader, in a dim fannish way, there was from time to time happy recognition of some of the points and stories covered (such as the probable-cause investigations) at least enough to make me feel I wasn’t drowning; other parts were entirely new. Which reminds me also of my other reflection, that a good teacher makes you feel they’re smart, but a great teacher makes you feel you’re smart. There was some of this sense, but mostly of the feeling that I really need to go read more nonfiction. The pages-long bibliography in this is well worth a study.
Also, it finally gave me the proper definition of the term “machine tool”, which I’d blipped over all my life. I hope that’s not the only takeaway – my memory is a sieve, and the book was dense – but still, gratifying.
Highly recommended.
Ta, L.
June 22, 2019
Another polished performance by the old pro. If you like stories of heroic engineers (and some not so heroic), and how our technical civilization has developed since the early Days of Steam, you will have fun with this. He has something fresh to say about even topics I know pretty well, and I learned a lot about the early days of satellite navigation, and how the Age of Silicon is likely to reach its limits soon. It's a pretty quick and easy read; he lost me only with a superfluous trip to Japan (Seiko watches) and one on weights and measures. These are the last two chapters, so easy to skim over. Very good book: 4 stars or better.
I saw Mr. Winchester give a book talk at Kepler's in Palo Alto. A couple of snippets from the talk: he said the book was sparked by a letter from a stranger in Florida, a scientific glass-blower -- and he showed off a glass piece the man had sent him as a thank-you: a little Klein bottle. I was one of the few in the (full house) audience who knew what it was (show of hands), and he mentioned that hardly anyone in his Houston talk recognized it. Which is amusing, since that's where I first saw a Klein bottle, long long ago, when I was in school at Rice, in Houston.
He pulled out his new iphone and told us that its Apple-designed chipset has 8 billion[!] transistors, and that someone at Intel said that there are now more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world's trees. Something like 15 quintillion of them!
I saw Mr. Winchester give a book talk at Kepler's in Palo Alto. A couple of snippets from the talk: he said the book was sparked by a letter from a stranger in Florida, a scientific glass-blower -- and he showed off a glass piece the man had sent him as a thank-you: a little Klein bottle. I was one of the few in the (full house) audience who knew what it was (show of hands), and he mentioned that hardly anyone in his Houston talk recognized it. Which is amusing, since that's where I first saw a Klein bottle, long long ago, when I was in school at Rice, in Houston.
He pulled out his new iphone and told us that its Apple-designed chipset has 8 billion[!] transistors, and that someone at Intel said that there are now more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world's trees. Something like 15 quintillion of them!
June 18, 2018
I should probably give this a rating of 3, but ...
There is ample historical research that makes this book. Winchester can weave a narrative and a story out of the various pieces of his story and kind of hold them together. Specific stories are excellent.
However, the book could have been about 30% shorter. Winchester becomes tedious with his over-interest in too much detail. Also, he is quite tedious in his personal insertions into the story--I don't care that he collected stamps and had a magnifying glass to do it.
The story of the Hubble telescope and its failing and reclaim was excellent, perhaps the highlight of the book. The "Afterword" on 'metrology' was perhaps the low point in its tediousness.
There is ample historical research that makes this book. Winchester can weave a narrative and a story out of the various pieces of his story and kind of hold them together. Specific stories are excellent.
However, the book could have been about 30% shorter. Winchester becomes tedious with his over-interest in too much detail. Also, he is quite tedious in his personal insertions into the story--I don't care that he collected stamps and had a magnifying glass to do it.
The story of the Hubble telescope and its failing and reclaim was excellent, perhaps the highlight of the book. The "Afterword" on 'metrology' was perhaps the low point in its tediousness.
September 20, 2018
Engineers are probably some of the least appreciated people in the UK and yet if you think about it everything is dependent on them. If there were no engineers you would not have items like your phone, your car, bicycles, kitchen gadgets, computers, electricity and even the very infrastructure that means that you can live life in the modern way. Things are much better built now too, compared to even twenty years ago, that extra precision we have got makes for better quality products. But, what is the difference is between accuracy and precision? And how is that making a difference in our modern world.
Beginning with the machines that started the industrial revolution off, steam engines and the rapid improvements that were made in the tolerance and efficiency of them, to the world's first unpickable lock, and the precision engineering from horologists that made clocks and timepieces more accurate, and people much later than ever before. All of these incremental advances made the things that people were buying a better each time and coupled with new inventions by the likes of John `Iron-Mad' Wilkinson and Joseph Whitworth made making things so much easier and made repeatable manufacture possible.
His stories of the way that engineers have made the modern world moves from the open road, where we learn how the Ford Model T was more precisely made than a Rolls-Royce. Each Rolls-Royce was handcrafted and when the men assembling it came across the odd part that didn't fit they would file and adjust to ensure that it did. Ford did not have the luxury of time to make things fit, each part had to fit, first time, every time. Cars are easy though, compared to aeroplanes, just to get several hundred tonnes of plane, passengers and luggage and off the ground requires another level of engineering expertise. Form the earliest planes that were held together with rivets, modern aircraft are glued together and the jet engines that can lift the great weights into the sky are some of the most powerful machines ever made. The finest engineers have developed turbine blades that can operate in an environment that is actually hotter than the melting temperature of the single crystal titanium alloy that they are made from. Each blade produces more power that an F1 car and they are spinning at around 10,000 rpm. They are reliable too, only very rarely does one of these engines fail, and he describes a flight that had to undertake an emergency landing when one component that was a fraction of a millimetre out self-destructed.
Silicone is immensely important to the modern world. Not only has it been used to fill the gaps in the wall so we can see through them, but its use in lenses have opened up miniature worlds and the wonders of the solar system to us. You are probably carrying around a lot of silicone too; its use in electronics has revolutionised the modern world and the machines that are used to make these ubiquitous microchips that are found in almost everything from coffee machines to watches that can tell you exactly where you are on the planet. These work from the GPS system, a technology that relies on the accurate time as measured using caesium clocks. It is time too that defines our most common measurements like the metre and the kilogramme and rendering the finely made platinum standard items a relic of the museum.
I may have a slight bias in reading and reviewing this as I am an engineer who is qualified in both electronics and mechanical engineering and I have designed things as varied as defence equipment to lighting to speaker cables. I thought that this was a really well-written book about the engineers that have made modern society what it is nowadays. It is well researched and full of interesting and anecdotal tales such as how we can now measure light years to within the width of a human hair that add so much to the story of precision over the years. I liked the way at the beginning of each chapter the tolerance increases for each change in technology and the precision required to achieve the next level up. Excellent book and can highly recommend.
Beginning with the machines that started the industrial revolution off, steam engines and the rapid improvements that were made in the tolerance and efficiency of them, to the world's first unpickable lock, and the precision engineering from horologists that made clocks and timepieces more accurate, and people much later than ever before. All of these incremental advances made the things that people were buying a better each time and coupled with new inventions by the likes of John `Iron-Mad' Wilkinson and Joseph Whitworth made making things so much easier and made repeatable manufacture possible.
His stories of the way that engineers have made the modern world moves from the open road, where we learn how the Ford Model T was more precisely made than a Rolls-Royce. Each Rolls-Royce was handcrafted and when the men assembling it came across the odd part that didn't fit they would file and adjust to ensure that it did. Ford did not have the luxury of time to make things fit, each part had to fit, first time, every time. Cars are easy though, compared to aeroplanes, just to get several hundred tonnes of plane, passengers and luggage and off the ground requires another level of engineering expertise. Form the earliest planes that were held together with rivets, modern aircraft are glued together and the jet engines that can lift the great weights into the sky are some of the most powerful machines ever made. The finest engineers have developed turbine blades that can operate in an environment that is actually hotter than the melting temperature of the single crystal titanium alloy that they are made from. Each blade produces more power that an F1 car and they are spinning at around 10,000 rpm. They are reliable too, only very rarely does one of these engines fail, and he describes a flight that had to undertake an emergency landing when one component that was a fraction of a millimetre out self-destructed.
Silicone is immensely important to the modern world. Not only has it been used to fill the gaps in the wall so we can see through them, but its use in lenses have opened up miniature worlds and the wonders of the solar system to us. You are probably carrying around a lot of silicone too; its use in electronics has revolutionised the modern world and the machines that are used to make these ubiquitous microchips that are found in almost everything from coffee machines to watches that can tell you exactly where you are on the planet. These work from the GPS system, a technology that relies on the accurate time as measured using caesium clocks. It is time too that defines our most common measurements like the metre and the kilogramme and rendering the finely made platinum standard items a relic of the museum.
I may have a slight bias in reading and reviewing this as I am an engineer who is qualified in both electronics and mechanical engineering and I have designed things as varied as defence equipment to lighting to speaker cables. I thought that this was a really well-written book about the engineers that have made modern society what it is nowadays. It is well researched and full of interesting and anecdotal tales such as how we can now measure light years to within the width of a human hair that add so much to the story of precision over the years. I liked the way at the beginning of each chapter the tolerance increases for each change in technology and the precision required to achieve the next level up. Excellent book and can highly recommend.
May 9, 2023
I have a guage block ranges from 100mm to 3.1mm which gets threatened with more usage than not.
Perhaps I should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock
The old saying goes its a pretty good day when your lucky enough to learn something new. Well definitely learnt a few new things days by the end of this book. GPS so common place now almost didn't happen. The military had been using it for 20 nearly years but it took a presidential edict from Ronald Reagan after the Korean airline tragedy 007 in 1983 pointing to faulty navigation to make it available for civilian use, adopted early by ocean going ships it was expensive bulky and large, airlines came next and when cost reduced significantly nearly everyone with a smart phone had access. In the 1990s the military tried again to wind GPS back but Clinton stopped that. China, Russia and European union have their own versions which is mostly used by the military.
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (Paperback) Simon Winchester
precision is itself reaching some kind of limits, where dimensions can be neither made nor measured—not so much because humans are too limited in their faculties to do so but, rather, because as engineering reaches ever downward, the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous. The German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, in helping in the 1920s to father the concepts of quantum mechanics, made discoveries and presented calculations that first suggested this might be true: that in dealing with the tiniest of particles, the tiniest of tolerances, the normal rules of precise measurement simply cease to apply. At near-and subatomic levels, solidity becomes merely a chimera; matter comes packaged as either waves or particles that are by themselves both indistinguishable and immeasurable and, even to the greatest talents, only vaguely comprehensible.”
― Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Perhaps I should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock
The old saying goes its a pretty good day when your lucky enough to learn something new. Well definitely learnt a few new things days by the end of this book. GPS so common place now almost didn't happen. The military had been using it for 20 nearly years but it took a presidential edict from Ronald Reagan after the Korean airline tragedy 007 in 1983 pointing to faulty navigation to make it available for civilian use, adopted early by ocean going ships it was expensive bulky and large, airlines came next and when cost reduced significantly nearly everyone with a smart phone had access. In the 1990s the military tried again to wind GPS back but Clinton stopped that. China, Russia and European union have their own versions which is mostly used by the military.
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (Paperback) Simon Winchester
precision is itself reaching some kind of limits, where dimensions can be neither made nor measured—not so much because humans are too limited in their faculties to do so but, rather, because as engineering reaches ever downward, the inherent properties of matter start to become impossibly ambiguous. The German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, in helping in the 1920s to father the concepts of quantum mechanics, made discoveries and presented calculations that first suggested this might be true: that in dealing with the tiniest of particles, the tiniest of tolerances, the normal rules of precise measurement simply cease to apply. At near-and subatomic levels, solidity becomes merely a chimera; matter comes packaged as either waves or particles that are by themselves both indistinguishable and immeasurable and, even to the greatest talents, only vaguely comprehensible.”
― Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
March 15, 2019
The popular image of the industrial revolution is of titanic forces unleashed by steam, of dark satanic mills and choking clouds of smog. But the machines did not spring into being, fully formed. Behind our modern age lies an obsession with precision, with exactitude in measurement and cutting that a medieval master craftsman would find extremely odd, and which we find extremely normal.
Winchester chronicles 250 years of precision engineering, starting with John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, a cannon manufacturer who armed the fleets that won Britain 100 years of empire, and who's technology, adopted in partnership with James Watt, created the first useful steam engine. Wilkinson's bores erred by no more than 1/10th of an inch, and in a few generations this would seem to be incredibly imprecise, as various engineers chased ever finer exactitude in manufacturing and measurement in the service of more reliable machines, economies of mass production, and eventually the atomic level precision of computer chips, GPS satellites, and LIGO, the gravity wave detecting observatory.
Winchester blends a love of precision equipment, such as Rolls-Royce cars, his father's Jo blocks, mechanical watches, and Leica camera lenses, with an a charming professionalism as a writer, leaping through centuries, biographical sketches, and ever finer tolerances. This is as good as popular history of technology gets!
Winchester chronicles 250 years of precision engineering, starting with John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, a cannon manufacturer who armed the fleets that won Britain 100 years of empire, and who's technology, adopted in partnership with James Watt, created the first useful steam engine. Wilkinson's bores erred by no more than 1/10th of an inch, and in a few generations this would seem to be incredibly imprecise, as various engineers chased ever finer exactitude in manufacturing and measurement in the service of more reliable machines, economies of mass production, and eventually the atomic level precision of computer chips, GPS satellites, and LIGO, the gravity wave detecting observatory.
Winchester blends a love of precision equipment, such as Rolls-Royce cars, his father's Jo blocks, mechanical watches, and Leica camera lenses, with an a charming professionalism as a writer, leaping through centuries, biographical sketches, and ever finer tolerances. This is as good as popular history of technology gets!
December 28, 2021
Ahoy there mateys! I listened to this one on audiobook read by the author. This is a nonfiction title about precision engineering and was a fascinating five star read. This book discusses things like locks, rigging, watches and how the way to measure changed too. All areas were full of fun facts and the author's enthusiasm for the subjects was delightful. I need to read more of his work for sure. Arrr!
May 10, 2021
Izcils gabals par precīzo lietu pasauli un kā līdz tai nonācām. Sākot no pulksteņiem un beidzot ar mikrotranzistoriem, tvaika dzinējiem un mūsdienu reaktīvajiem dzinējiem, optikas un GPS. Izglītojoša un sarakstīta tā, lai lasītājam nebūtu garlaicīgi.
May 14, 2018
If I had noticed that this is the #1 best selling book in the science measurement category I might not have bought it. That is one oversight I am extremely grateful for, however. This is a very good book that is sure to surprise you and you don't have to be an engineer or scientist to appreciate it.
Winchester is a modern polymath with a high level of curiosity, both scientific and philosophical. And that’s why he may be the only person with the expertise to have written this book.
The author catalogues the advancement of technology from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution. (This is definitely NOT another book about the disruptors of Silicon Valley.) His examples are easy to follow and very informative. Except for the founders of Intel, he spends most of his time on inventers and engineers you probably haven’t heard of.
And it works because in the end this is not so much a book about technology as it is a book about precision. Accuracy allows us to make nice things that last, but technological and scientific advancement require precision in both dimension and location. Engineering, in fact, outstripped precision quite early in the Industrial Age until people like John Wilkinson, Joseph Bramah, and Henry Maudslay came along and saw the problem.
Philosophy enters the picture when Winchester notes the obvious duality between science and nature. Science requires precision. Nature abhors it. “For might there be in the wider world, in truth, simply too much precision? Might today’s singular devotion to mechanical exactitude be clouding a valued but very different component of the human condition, one that, as a result, is being allowed to vanish?”
Precision allows computation. Imprecision, however, requires thought. Binary processors are very precise. Books, written in the human construct of language, are not. And that’s why I think it’s a shame that many people today are reading less. Computation without thought is not progress.
Can we not also assume that precision takes money? The great scientific computers of today require the accuracy of atomic clocks rather than the simple quartz watch that most of us get by with. The meter wasn’t precise enough for the International Astronomical Union so they developed the Angstrom, a length equal to one ten-billionth of a meter, defined by the spectral wavelength emitted by heated cadmium.
And who is going to pay for all of that precision? And what do we do with the people who don’t have access to it? Everything, including precision and technology, exists in context. We cannot blindly pursue the latter without understanding the implications for our social, educational, and economic institutions and systems.
If we ignore it, nature will win. “Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.”
Winchester is a modern polymath with a high level of curiosity, both scientific and philosophical. And that’s why he may be the only person with the expertise to have written this book.
The author catalogues the advancement of technology from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution. (This is definitely NOT another book about the disruptors of Silicon Valley.) His examples are easy to follow and very informative. Except for the founders of Intel, he spends most of his time on inventers and engineers you probably haven’t heard of.
And it works because in the end this is not so much a book about technology as it is a book about precision. Accuracy allows us to make nice things that last, but technological and scientific advancement require precision in both dimension and location. Engineering, in fact, outstripped precision quite early in the Industrial Age until people like John Wilkinson, Joseph Bramah, and Henry Maudslay came along and saw the problem.
Philosophy enters the picture when Winchester notes the obvious duality between science and nature. Science requires precision. Nature abhors it. “For might there be in the wider world, in truth, simply too much precision? Might today’s singular devotion to mechanical exactitude be clouding a valued but very different component of the human condition, one that, as a result, is being allowed to vanish?”
Precision allows computation. Imprecision, however, requires thought. Binary processors are very precise. Books, written in the human construct of language, are not. And that’s why I think it’s a shame that many people today are reading less. Computation without thought is not progress.
Can we not also assume that precision takes money? The great scientific computers of today require the accuracy of atomic clocks rather than the simple quartz watch that most of us get by with. The meter wasn’t precise enough for the International Astronomical Union so they developed the Angstrom, a length equal to one ten-billionth of a meter, defined by the spectral wavelength emitted by heated cadmium.
And who is going to pay for all of that precision? And what do we do with the people who don’t have access to it? Everything, including precision and technology, exists in context. We cannot blindly pursue the latter without understanding the implications for our social, educational, and economic institutions and systems.
If we ignore it, nature will win. “Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.”
April 17, 2020
Despite the excellent premise and all the fascinating stories, which I enjoyed very much, I can't help feeling a little disappointed with this book. Winchester cranks out his books in a way that feels a bit rushed to me. The Man Who Loved China and The Map that Changed the World both spent a lot of time saying how wonderful/ incredible/revolutionary the respective subjects of the books were but little time explaining WHY, perhaps because that would have taken a lot more work. I get the feeling that I could have found a lot of this out by spending the same amount of time reading wikipedia and other articles although Winchester is obviously a pretty good story teller.
June 23, 2018
This book started off great, but I oddly found it later to be rather rambling. After the first few chapters, the author seem to be unable to decide whether he wanted the book to be a first hand account of his own experiences or a brief overview of important events and people in science and engineering. I found the last two-thirds of the book to be very hit or miss.
September 8, 2019
Dad was an electrical engineer with the heating and controls division of Honeywell. He'd wired the cottage in Michigan himself, done his own car maintenance and repairs and helped others with theirs, maintained a shop of sorts in our basement, building bicycles from parts found in the alley and just generally tinkering as a means of relaxation. If he didn't know how to fix something, he'd get a book and learn how. I was quite different, much to his chagrin. I read this history of precision engineering, in some part, with him in mind. If he were still alive it would have served as a welcome present.
May 26, 2020
5 Stars for The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World (audiobook) by Simon Winchester read by the author. This is a must read for anybody that’s interested in engineering. Simon Winchester does an amazing job bringing this topic to life. I also really enjoy his narration.
July 8, 2018
All this precision and then... there's me with: "lefty loosey righty tighty".
October 26, 2022
I might not have read this book if it had been written by someone else. The history of the quest for ever greater levels of industrial precision sounds interesting, but in the hands of some writers it would be a dull recitation of charts and tables. I have read two of Winchester’s other books, The Professor and the Madman and The Map that Changed the World, and I like his writing style. He was a journalist, and writes like one, knowing when to step back from math and machinery to emphasize the history and the people involved, and he never gets so deeply into the engineering details that the reader loses the thread of the narrative.
An argument can be made that the first documented precision instrument was the Antikythera mechanism, dated variously to 178 or 204 BC. It is an assembly of finely made gears and cogs, some to a tolerance of one-tenth of a millimeter, and built to predict celestial phenomena. Whatever its merits as an engineering masterpiece, however, it cannot be considered a precision instrument, because modern reconstructions show it to be wildly inaccurate, up to 38 degrees out of true. For another two thousand years craftsmen would continue to make things like this: carefully and expertly, one at a time, and none of their parts interchangeable with others.
The dawn of precision engineering in its modern sense has an agreed-up father and date, John Wilkinson in May of 1776. He had previously patented a process for making canons by casting them as a single, solid piece, and then boring out the tube. Previously they had been hollow-cast, which introduced a number of problems, such as the bore being out of true or having weak spots which could lead to an explosion when the cannon was fired.
As Wilkinson was perfecting his process, James Watt was struggling to improve steam engines. One of the biggest problems was that the piston did not fit the cylinder very well, so a great deal of steam, and therefore power, was lost. He turned to Wilkinson, who bored a cylinder that fit Watt’s piston with a precision never seen before, leaving a gap of only one-tenth of an inch. From that moment the race was on to achieve ever greater levels of precision across all areas of industrial production.
Each chapter of the book is built around a specific person or device, and as time moves forward, ever greater levels of precision are achieved. Some of these are well known, such as John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, which in 1761 completed a 5000 mile sea voyage over 147 days with an error of only 1 minute 54.5 seconds. Modern consumer grade quartz clocks are only accurate to fifteen seconds a month, so over five months they might gain or lose 75 seconds, and thus the Harrison chronometer’s 115 seconds error, over two hundred sixty years ago, is still remarkably close close to modern standards. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude is an excellent recounting of Harrison and his amazing mechanical devices.
Others incidents from the book are less well known, though they played important roles during their time. Sailing ships carried hundreds of pulley blocks to help manage sails and rigging, and they had previously been made one at a time by skilled craftsmen. During the Napoleonic era the Royal Navy expanded and needed one hundred thirty thousand of them every year, far outstripping the ability of the craftsmen to keep up with demand. Henry Maudslay, a mechanical genius who designed and built fine locks took on the task, and over six years created a series of machines that entirely automated the production process, producing one block a minute, which worked so well it was in use until 1965. However, the author also points out the social costs of automation; in this case over one hundred skilled craftsmen were replaced by ten unskilled laborers whose only jobs were to lubricate the machines and keep them fed with raw materials.
Two very different automobiles are used to describe precision at the dawn of the twentieth century. First was the Rolls-Royce, lovingly crafted by artisans obsessively devoted to making every single part perfect. The machines were the wonders of their age, but each was a bespoke work of engineering artistry, and making parts interchangeable was not even a design consideration. If you could afford a Rolls, you could afford to have new parts hand-crafted to fit it. Henry Ford, on the other hand, built cars for the masses. He did not invent the factory assembly line, but he perfected its use. Not only did he sell over sixteen million Model Ts between 1908 and 1925, but as more and more production steps were automated he was able to lower the price almost every year, from $850 to $260 by the end of the model run. And every part on every car was designed to be interchangeable with other vehicles.
The story moves on to the development of jet engines in the 1930s, and the author makes two points which I had never considered. First, a reciprocating engine has many moving parts: pistons, cams, valves, crankshaft, and many many more, hundreds in all. A turbine basically has one: the rotating shaft which compresses air between the rotor and stator blades before feeding it into the combustion chamber. Second, a piston engine’s power is constrained by the size and number of its pistons, which set an upper limit on how much air can be taken in and thus how much power is generated with each stroke, but a turbine’s intakes can be as large as needed; on a Boeing 777 engine they are over 9 feet wide.
Aircraft play a large role in the next chapter as well, which focuses on the limits of our engineering abilities, using the example of Qantas Flight 32, a loaded Airbus 380 which experienced a catastrophic engine failure shortly after taking off from Singapore on November 4, 2010. With some expert piloting, and a bit of luck, the aircraft made it back with no loss of life. The post-accident investigation revealed the likely culprit: a tiny metal pipe five centimeters long and three-quarters of a centimeter in diameter which had developed a crack that burst, causing a fire inside the engine, resulting in one of the turbine blades breaking free. The part had been improperly manufactured: when it was being bored out it apparently slipped just a tiny amount in its fixture, causing one side to be machined half a millimeter thinner than the other; this caused an imbalance of stresses which led to metal fatigue, which led to the failure. The post accident investigation revealed similarly defective parts on dozens of other aircraft. The question that gets raised, then, is when do we lose human oversight of engineering precision, and have to place our trust in machines which have themselves been designed and are operated by humans who may incapable of recognizing when things go wrong?
The book next discusses cameras and moves on to the quest for ever more precise ways to tell time, resulting in the development of GPS, which can be used to locate one’s position to within a few feet anywhere on the earth that satellites are visible from. The American GPS system uses thirty-one satellites, but it is no longer the only one. The EU has created its own, called Galileo; the Russians have GLONASS, and the Chinese Beidou. A company called Coros sells smartwatches that can connect simultaneously to the American, Russian, and Chinese systems, allowing wearers to find their position to within centimeters.
The book moves on to computers, telling the story of the invention of the transistor and the development of the integrated circuit. The first IC was the the Intel 4004, released in November 1971 as part of a calculator for a Japanese company, and was advertised as having the same processing power as the room-sized Eniac computers of the 1940s. The processing core of the 4004 was a tiny sliver of silicon twelve millimeters wide and containing 2300 transistors spaced ten microns apart. By 1985, with the Intel 80386, the circuit spacing had shrunk to one micron and the chip had more than a million transistors. Today there are chips using 5 nanometer processes, containing billions of transistors with a density of one hundred million per square millimeter; each transistor only about one hundred atoms thick.
In Washington State and Louisiana are Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories, built to detect the gravity waves which Einstein had predicted, and they have successfully done so on several occasions. The precision required to do this is mind-boggling:
And finally, the author visits a Seiko factory in Japan and waxes euphoric over the handmade Grand Seiko mechanical watches. I respect the precision and care that go into making them – each craftsman produces only two a day, but when I looked them up on the internet I didn’t think they were particularly attractive and they go for $6800 each. I’ll stick with my Apple Watch.
Simon Winchester has an engaging writing style, and is never dull. The examples he uses in this book to describe ever greater advances in precision are interesting and informative, illuminating how the modern world has undergone unimaginable changes in just a few centuries. There is a lot to learn here, and a lot to think about, so I recommend this book for anyone with an interest in science and society.
An argument can be made that the first documented precision instrument was the Antikythera mechanism, dated variously to 178 or 204 BC. It is an assembly of finely made gears and cogs, some to a tolerance of one-tenth of a millimeter, and built to predict celestial phenomena. Whatever its merits as an engineering masterpiece, however, it cannot be considered a precision instrument, because modern reconstructions show it to be wildly inaccurate, up to 38 degrees out of true. For another two thousand years craftsmen would continue to make things like this: carefully and expertly, one at a time, and none of their parts interchangeable with others.
The dawn of precision engineering in its modern sense has an agreed-up father and date, John Wilkinson in May of 1776. He had previously patented a process for making canons by casting them as a single, solid piece, and then boring out the tube. Previously they had been hollow-cast, which introduced a number of problems, such as the bore being out of true or having weak spots which could lead to an explosion when the cannon was fired.
As Wilkinson was perfecting his process, James Watt was struggling to improve steam engines. One of the biggest problems was that the piston did not fit the cylinder very well, so a great deal of steam, and therefore power, was lost. He turned to Wilkinson, who bored a cylinder that fit Watt’s piston with a precision never seen before, leaving a gap of only one-tenth of an inch. From that moment the race was on to achieve ever greater levels of precision across all areas of industrial production.
Each chapter of the book is built around a specific person or device, and as time moves forward, ever greater levels of precision are achieved. Some of these are well known, such as John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, which in 1761 completed a 5000 mile sea voyage over 147 days with an error of only 1 minute 54.5 seconds. Modern consumer grade quartz clocks are only accurate to fifteen seconds a month, so over five months they might gain or lose 75 seconds, and thus the Harrison chronometer’s 115 seconds error, over two hundred sixty years ago, is still remarkably close close to modern standards. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude is an excellent recounting of Harrison and his amazing mechanical devices.
Others incidents from the book are less well known, though they played important roles during their time. Sailing ships carried hundreds of pulley blocks to help manage sails and rigging, and they had previously been made one at a time by skilled craftsmen. During the Napoleonic era the Royal Navy expanded and needed one hundred thirty thousand of them every year, far outstripping the ability of the craftsmen to keep up with demand. Henry Maudslay, a mechanical genius who designed and built fine locks took on the task, and over six years created a series of machines that entirely automated the production process, producing one block a minute, which worked so well it was in use until 1965. However, the author also points out the social costs of automation; in this case over one hundred skilled craftsmen were replaced by ten unskilled laborers whose only jobs were to lubricate the machines and keep them fed with raw materials.
Two very different automobiles are used to describe precision at the dawn of the twentieth century. First was the Rolls-Royce, lovingly crafted by artisans obsessively devoted to making every single part perfect. The machines were the wonders of their age, but each was a bespoke work of engineering artistry, and making parts interchangeable was not even a design consideration. If you could afford a Rolls, you could afford to have new parts hand-crafted to fit it. Henry Ford, on the other hand, built cars for the masses. He did not invent the factory assembly line, but he perfected its use. Not only did he sell over sixteen million Model Ts between 1908 and 1925, but as more and more production steps were automated he was able to lower the price almost every year, from $850 to $260 by the end of the model run. And every part on every car was designed to be interchangeable with other vehicles.
The story moves on to the development of jet engines in the 1930s, and the author makes two points which I had never considered. First, a reciprocating engine has many moving parts: pistons, cams, valves, crankshaft, and many many more, hundreds in all. A turbine basically has one: the rotating shaft which compresses air between the rotor and stator blades before feeding it into the combustion chamber. Second, a piston engine’s power is constrained by the size and number of its pistons, which set an upper limit on how much air can be taken in and thus how much power is generated with each stroke, but a turbine’s intakes can be as large as needed; on a Boeing 777 engine they are over 9 feet wide.
Aircraft play a large role in the next chapter as well, which focuses on the limits of our engineering abilities, using the example of Qantas Flight 32, a loaded Airbus 380 which experienced a catastrophic engine failure shortly after taking off from Singapore on November 4, 2010. With some expert piloting, and a bit of luck, the aircraft made it back with no loss of life. The post-accident investigation revealed the likely culprit: a tiny metal pipe five centimeters long and three-quarters of a centimeter in diameter which had developed a crack that burst, causing a fire inside the engine, resulting in one of the turbine blades breaking free. The part had been improperly manufactured: when it was being bored out it apparently slipped just a tiny amount in its fixture, causing one side to be machined half a millimeter thinner than the other; this caused an imbalance of stresses which led to metal fatigue, which led to the failure. The post accident investigation revealed similarly defective parts on dozens of other aircraft. The question that gets raised, then, is when do we lose human oversight of engineering precision, and have to place our trust in machines which have themselves been designed and are operated by humans who may incapable of recognizing when things go wrong?
The book next discusses cameras and moves on to the quest for ever more precise ways to tell time, resulting in the development of GPS, which can be used to locate one’s position to within a few feet anywhere on the earth that satellites are visible from. The American GPS system uses thirty-one satellites, but it is no longer the only one. The EU has created its own, called Galileo; the Russians have GLONASS, and the Chinese Beidou. A company called Coros sells smartwatches that can connect simultaneously to the American, Russian, and Chinese systems, allowing wearers to find their position to within centimeters.
The book moves on to computers, telling the story of the invention of the transistor and the development of the integrated circuit. The first IC was the the Intel 4004, released in November 1971 as part of a calculator for a Japanese company, and was advertised as having the same processing power as the room-sized Eniac computers of the 1940s. The processing core of the 4004 was a tiny sliver of silicon twelve millimeters wide and containing 2300 transistors spaced ten microns apart. By 1985, with the Intel 80386, the circuit spacing had shrunk to one micron and the chip had more than a million transistors. Today there are chips using 5 nanometer processes, containing billions of transistors with a density of one hundred million per square millimeter; each transistor only about one hundred atoms thick.
In Washington State and Louisiana are Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories, built to detect the gravity waves which Einstein had predicted, and they have successfully done so on several occasions. The precision required to do this is mind-boggling:
The test masses on the LIGO devices...are so exact in their making that the light reflected by them can be measured to one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a proton. They can also compute with great precision the distance between this planet and our neighbor star Alpha Centauri A, which lies 4.3 light-years away. The distance in miles of 4.3 light-years is 26 trillion miles, or, in full, 26,000,000,000,000 miles. It is now known with absolute certainty that the cylindrical masses on LIGO can help to measure that vast distance to within the width of a single human hair.
And finally, the author visits a Seiko factory in Japan and waxes euphoric over the handmade Grand Seiko mechanical watches. I respect the precision and care that go into making them – each craftsman produces only two a day, but when I looked them up on the internet I didn’t think they were particularly attractive and they go for $6800 each. I’ll stick with my Apple Watch.
Simon Winchester has an engaging writing style, and is never dull. The examples he uses in this book to describe ever greater advances in precision are interesting and informative, illuminating how the modern world has undergone unimaginable changes in just a few centuries. There is a lot to learn here, and a lot to think about, so I recommend this book for anyone with an interest in science and society.
June 7, 2021
В жанре "как работают вещи" я уважаю больше всего единственное направление: хардкорные мемуары инженеров или иначе причастных людей. На другой стороне спектра находится объяснительная журналистика с условной структурой повествования "и вот как [X] была центральной силой за кулисами всей человеческой истории всё это время, а вы и не знали"; уже читал книги, где X это деньги, сахар, соль (вместе с сахаром или отдельно — две разные книги), логистика, вертолёты, тяжёлая музыка, видеоигра DOOM, да и мало ли что ещё.
The Perfectionists принадлежит ко второму подходу, но использует это себе во благо, прекрасно понимая свою близость к лирике. Не подробная хронология событий, но чествование отрасли точного машиностроения.
Почти каждая глава разбирает какое-нибудь из общепризнанных чудес инженерной мысли, и часто делает это с достаточно неожиданных ракурсов. В целом — хороший способ получить свежий взгляд на область, но я бы не использовал эту книгу как первый источник информации по вопросу. Предупреждение: стиль достаточно многословный и старомодный.
PS. Автор неоднократно возвращается к противопоставлению наборов образов за словами precise и accurate; заплатил бы ещё раз за книгу, но теперь в русском издании (увы, не существует) просто чтобы посмотреть, как выпутается переводчик.
The Perfectionists принадлежит ко второму подходу, но использует это себе во благо, прекрасно понимая свою близость к лирике. Не подробная хронология событий, но чествование отрасли точного машиностроения.
Почти каждая глава разбирает какое-нибудь из общепризнанных чудес инженерной мысли, и часто делает это с достаточно неожиданных ракурсов. В целом — хороший способ получить свежий взгляд на область, но я бы не использовал эту книгу как первый источник информации по вопросу. Предупреждение: стиль достаточно многословный и старомодный.
PS. Автор неоднократно возвращается к противопоставлению наборов образов за словами precise и accurate; заплатил бы ещё раз за книгу, но теперь в русском издании (увы, не существует) просто чтобы посмотреть, как выпутается переводчик.
September 8, 2023
This book takes a look at the evolution of precision in measurements, and the technological accomplishments that have accompanied them. As is implied by the title, the author dives deeply into each topic. I found some of these topics riveting (the Hubble Telescope and its repair, the development of nanotechnology, timekeeping, history of GPS). Readers will find their own personal favorites among these essays. It requires a general interest in both science and history to fully appreciate it. It should appeal greatly to the engineers among us.
I particularly enjoyed the ending, where Winchester takes a step back to examine the concept of an increasing level of precision, and whether or not it is an advantage or a drawback. For example, there are many areas that add value to our lives but are not related to precise measures (such as art, nature, and cultural works). There are impacts on quality of life, not all of which are positive (such as displacement of human labor). There may come a time when further increases in precision will outmatch human capacity to achieve it. It is obvious that Winchester is enthusiastic about this material. I found it both entertaining and educational.
I particularly enjoyed the ending, where Winchester takes a step back to examine the concept of an increasing level of precision, and whether or not it is an advantage or a drawback. For example, there are many areas that add value to our lives but are not related to precise measures (such as art, nature, and cultural works). There are impacts on quality of life, not all of which are positive (such as displacement of human labor). There may come a time when further increases in precision will outmatch human capacity to achieve it. It is obvious that Winchester is enthusiastic about this material. I found it both entertaining and educational.
March 26, 2019
This book was surprisingly good, to me. To someone who is non-technical and not interested in the technical history of precision machinery, it might be mostly boring. There is probably something here for everyone, though, such as the story of the Hubble telescope and its rescue from total failure after being launched into orbit.
The story starts out with the author recounting an experience when he was young, and his father brought out a heavy oak box with a brass tag on the outside. Inside were about a hundred metal tiles of various sizes, with numeric labels. These tiles were so precisely flat that when one was placed on top of another, they could not be pulled apart, only slid apart like strong magnets. They didn't even seem to be two objects, because the line where they joined was so precise that it looked like the two tiles were fused together. The tiles are used for measuring things to very tight tolerances. Engineers, and people like me see the beauty in something like this. His mother, on the other hand, was not too happy about these oily pieces of metal on her clean tablecloth.
The book goes on to tell all about things like rifles, steam engines, cannons, etc, back in the mid 19th century. Rifles were hand-made, and didn't have interchangeable parts. If a part broke, the rifle could not be used until it was returned to have a new part made for it. Cannons were made in a way that produced variations in the size of the bore, so cannon balls didn't always fit correctly. The author tells about the people who solved these problems, while explaining along the way how they worked and why problems arose. Along the way, men devised machines to help make the products, because machines could make things exactly the same every time. Craftsmen were insulted by this, but they couldn't really change it, because it was true.
I learned a lot from the book, as it explained steam engines, gasoline engines, Rolls-Royces and Fords, fountain pens and watches, jet engines, rockets, the development of the Hubble telescope, all the while showing how precision got more and more exact. It explains how standards were created and improved, how measuring units went from an inch that was the size of someone's thumb up to being a standard meter that was a fraction of the distance from the north pole to the equator along a particular meridian, how even that wasn't enough because it turned out to be off by 2/10ths of a millimeter, so they came up with a new standard, which was simply “the length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton-86 atom.” I tried to calibrate my metric ruler, but gave up pretty quickly.
Even the lowly second has been calibrated using an atomic clock that's so accurate that it would neither lose nor gain a second in 138 million years. Wind it once, and you're done.
After all this talk about super precision, there was a chapter on Japan, and their fondness for both precision and ancient hand-made imprecision. He included a visit to the Seiko factory which at one time had the most accurate timepieces in the world based on their quartz crystal technology. They make some very high precision watches. When the author offered to trade his special Rolex for a Seiko, they laughed and declined. Not far away is a place famous for its hand-hammered metallic teapots, etc, that are considered equally valuable to the people around there.
The story starts out with the author recounting an experience when he was young, and his father brought out a heavy oak box with a brass tag on the outside. Inside were about a hundred metal tiles of various sizes, with numeric labels. These tiles were so precisely flat that when one was placed on top of another, they could not be pulled apart, only slid apart like strong magnets. They didn't even seem to be two objects, because the line where they joined was so precise that it looked like the two tiles were fused together. The tiles are used for measuring things to very tight tolerances. Engineers, and people like me see the beauty in something like this. His mother, on the other hand, was not too happy about these oily pieces of metal on her clean tablecloth.
The book goes on to tell all about things like rifles, steam engines, cannons, etc, back in the mid 19th century. Rifles were hand-made, and didn't have interchangeable parts. If a part broke, the rifle could not be used until it was returned to have a new part made for it. Cannons were made in a way that produced variations in the size of the bore, so cannon balls didn't always fit correctly. The author tells about the people who solved these problems, while explaining along the way how they worked and why problems arose. Along the way, men devised machines to help make the products, because machines could make things exactly the same every time. Craftsmen were insulted by this, but they couldn't really change it, because it was true.
I learned a lot from the book, as it explained steam engines, gasoline engines, Rolls-Royces and Fords, fountain pens and watches, jet engines, rockets, the development of the Hubble telescope, all the while showing how precision got more and more exact. It explains how standards were created and improved, how measuring units went from an inch that was the size of someone's thumb up to being a standard meter that was a fraction of the distance from the north pole to the equator along a particular meridian, how even that wasn't enough because it turned out to be off by 2/10ths of a millimeter, so they came up with a new standard, which was simply “the length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton-86 atom.” I tried to calibrate my metric ruler, but gave up pretty quickly.
Even the lowly second has been calibrated using an atomic clock that's so accurate that it would neither lose nor gain a second in 138 million years. Wind it once, and you're done.
After all this talk about super precision, there was a chapter on Japan, and their fondness for both precision and ancient hand-made imprecision. He included a visit to the Seiko factory which at one time had the most accurate timepieces in the world based on their quartz crystal technology. They make some very high precision watches. When the author offered to trade his special Rolex for a Seiko, they laughed and declined. Not far away is a place famous for its hand-hammered metallic teapots, etc, that are considered equally valuable to the people around there.
September 2, 2019
Reading this book could turn you into a nervous wreck. When, for example, you step on a plane and consider the incredibly hot temperatures of the turbine engines, so hot that the entire plane and all of its passengers would melt down into a molten puddle, were it not for thousands of tiny cooling holes in the blades. Any one of which, even infinitesimally out of sync, would mean disaster. Fortunately, we don’t think of such matters, we just take for granted that thousands of intricate parts will work perfectly together and get us where we want to go.
Winchester in this fascinating book explains how many other modern inventions that make our world what it is today work. Because of our casual familiarity, we are incurious about them, but what Winchester does is make them interesting in almost wondrous ways.
His approach is an historical one, starting with the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the Industrial revolution which shapes modern history in every conceivable way. The steam engine was successful only because of decreasing space between moving parts, what is called tolerance. Precise measurements, originally not easy to create, were necessary to fully enclose the power of steam, and keep it from escaping. From here, he goes to weaponry, clocks and timepieces, the development of the automobile, the airplane, space travel, all of which depend upon the development of micro technology. It’s also given us radio, telephones, motion pictures, television computers, cell phones, the gps, and more devices than we can even think of.
One absolutely essential key to all of these developments is to have precision measurements and the machinery and equipment to be able to replicate, exactly, the same precision in multiple copies, all of which make mass production possible. Incredibly, human error is absolutely minimized by tools which do the measuring and creation of these instruments on which we depend. Yes, accidents do occur, but they are extremely rare and are due to human actions which interfere with the technically perfect instruments of creation.
Much of the last chapters are devoted to what could be called miniaturization, tolerances that become incredibly fine, in the millionths of millionths of inches to the point of atomic structure. Is there a limit to this process? Probably, but it hasn't been reached yet, and it’s what enables, for example, our cell phones to handle ever increasing amounts of processing capability.
Are there any problems with precision engineering? Winchester writes, “Philosophically, morally, psychologically, intellectually and – dare one say it - spiritually there are troubling aspects to humankind’s ever-greater reliance on devices and techniques of ever-enhanced precision.”
About these concerns, I wish Winchester would have said more, but the problem might be that we don’t know what is going to be the downside of all of these “improvements”. A loss of intimacy, irrelevance of traditional forms of government, a paralysis in a breakdown due to war or an ecological disaster? We don’t know. All of this, though, may be outside the scope of Winchester’s marvelously descriptive book.
Winchester in this fascinating book explains how many other modern inventions that make our world what it is today work. Because of our casual familiarity, we are incurious about them, but what Winchester does is make them interesting in almost wondrous ways.
His approach is an historical one, starting with the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the Industrial revolution which shapes modern history in every conceivable way. The steam engine was successful only because of decreasing space between moving parts, what is called tolerance. Precise measurements, originally not easy to create, were necessary to fully enclose the power of steam, and keep it from escaping. From here, he goes to weaponry, clocks and timepieces, the development of the automobile, the airplane, space travel, all of which depend upon the development of micro technology. It’s also given us radio, telephones, motion pictures, television computers, cell phones, the gps, and more devices than we can even think of.
One absolutely essential key to all of these developments is to have precision measurements and the machinery and equipment to be able to replicate, exactly, the same precision in multiple copies, all of which make mass production possible. Incredibly, human error is absolutely minimized by tools which do the measuring and creation of these instruments on which we depend. Yes, accidents do occur, but they are extremely rare and are due to human actions which interfere with the technically perfect instruments of creation.
Much of the last chapters are devoted to what could be called miniaturization, tolerances that become incredibly fine, in the millionths of millionths of inches to the point of atomic structure. Is there a limit to this process? Probably, but it hasn't been reached yet, and it’s what enables, for example, our cell phones to handle ever increasing amounts of processing capability.
Are there any problems with precision engineering? Winchester writes, “Philosophically, morally, psychologically, intellectually and – dare one say it - spiritually there are troubling aspects to humankind’s ever-greater reliance on devices and techniques of ever-enhanced precision.”
About these concerns, I wish Winchester would have said more, but the problem might be that we don’t know what is going to be the downside of all of these “improvements”. A loss of intimacy, irrelevance of traditional forms of government, a paralysis in a breakdown due to war or an ecological disaster? We don’t know. All of this, though, may be outside the scope of Winchester’s marvelously descriptive book.
May 16, 2020
The Perfectionists is a rare book about unheralded engineers, who have truly built the modern society around us. Like in the popular TV series Big Bang Theory, theoreticians like Sheldon Cooper get the limelight while directly and indirectly undermining the contributions of every Wolowitz. We often forget that the armchair thinkers genuinely struggle if they have to change even a lightbulb. Real-life innovations require different skills that have had as much impact on humanity as the ideas of their celebrated counterparts. Here is a popular book that talks about the men who changed the world without ever mentioning a Plato or an Einstein or a Darwin.
While conceptually perfect, the book proves why certain topics - however important - do not make good reading for a common man. Specific laws of any nation, a handbook on the gene identification, or a detailed history of evolutions of a pin are examples of such topics. The author tries hard to infuse excitement and continuity in the tale of engineers and their creations, but mostly in vain.
Timepieces to the GPS, through rifles, automobiles, and to the measurement systems, do not make a well-related, compelling history. The disconnectedness of the chapters is equally present within them. The attempts to generate interest through the incidents surrounding innovations or involving the innovators are mostly humdrum. Even more annoying are the engineering details interspersed throughout. They are the subject matter, but their laborious presentations are unlikely to inspire anyone but the most devoted. In fact, the true geeks may find plentiful misrepresentations and errors when the author gets technical, while the rest gloss over.
The truth is that many theoreticians - Galileo, Einstein, Darwin, to name a few - have had lives full of narratable incidents. The barebones of their discoveries are understandable; they inspire thoughts or discussions of profound importance even in the minds of most novice amateurs. The same does not apply to the characters and their subject matters here. We should express our admiration to these less-heralded innovators for their immense contributions for sure. And pointing that is the book's most significant achievement.
While conceptually perfect, the book proves why certain topics - however important - do not make good reading for a common man. Specific laws of any nation, a handbook on the gene identification, or a detailed history of evolutions of a pin are examples of such topics. The author tries hard to infuse excitement and continuity in the tale of engineers and their creations, but mostly in vain.
Timepieces to the GPS, through rifles, automobiles, and to the measurement systems, do not make a well-related, compelling history. The disconnectedness of the chapters is equally present within them. The attempts to generate interest through the incidents surrounding innovations or involving the innovators are mostly humdrum. Even more annoying are the engineering details interspersed throughout. They are the subject matter, but their laborious presentations are unlikely to inspire anyone but the most devoted. In fact, the true geeks may find plentiful misrepresentations and errors when the author gets technical, while the rest gloss over.
The truth is that many theoreticians - Galileo, Einstein, Darwin, to name a few - have had lives full of narratable incidents. The barebones of their discoveries are understandable; they inspire thoughts or discussions of profound importance even in the minds of most novice amateurs. The same does not apply to the characters and their subject matters here. We should express our admiration to these less-heralded innovators for their immense contributions for sure. And pointing that is the book's most significant achievement.
August 19, 2018
I like Simon Winchester's works. He narrated this audio CD, as only the author of the work can. I enjoyed his research, prose and velvet hammer like reading during August 2018.
“The Perfectionists” reels the reader in, making us think more deeply about our everyday lives, and the hardware that makes it possible. The science, the drive, the sheer sweat and toil of a few noted and countless forgotten people that have fashioned this successful society makes for an easy-to-relate-to journey.
One lesson I see reinforced throughout is that the power of perfection, and only perfect precision, will achieve the stated goal. This standard is driven home with examples of mistakes, both small and mighty. Human error is a relentless weak link.
This vaunted society of ours, with globe girdling technology at our fingertips, (like writing this book review on the World Wide Web) has drilled down to lots of small things. Printed inside Apple’s 2017 model A11 Bionic chip there are 4,300,000,000 transistors. I recall being excited when a birthday gift AM radio had seven.
Winchester offers effective nonfiction portrayed with accurate wordsmithing.
“The Perfectionists” reels the reader in, making us think more deeply about our everyday lives, and the hardware that makes it possible. The science, the drive, the sheer sweat and toil of a few noted and countless forgotten people that have fashioned this successful society makes for an easy-to-relate-to journey.
One lesson I see reinforced throughout is that the power of perfection, and only perfect precision, will achieve the stated goal. This standard is driven home with examples of mistakes, both small and mighty. Human error is a relentless weak link.
This vaunted society of ours, with globe girdling technology at our fingertips, (like writing this book review on the World Wide Web) has drilled down to lots of small things. Printed inside Apple’s 2017 model A11 Bionic chip there are 4,300,000,000 transistors. I recall being excited when a birthday gift AM radio had seven.
Winchester offers effective nonfiction portrayed with accurate wordsmithing.
Read
June 11, 2018This just wasn't for me. I've accepted the fact that I'm not interested in everything.
April 22, 2023
This was a very interesting book. I do enjoy this author and the extensive amount of research he puts into each book. He has a passion for learning and writing. This one was about equal parts enlightening and dry (boring). What a juxtaposition! I have a deep appreciation for those who have a passion in precision engineering. I don’t have that passion but I appreciate the art of it and this book made me more aware how important and extensive the importance of precision is in our daily lives.
December 22, 2020
I listened to this on audiobook, narrated by the author, and I’m really glad I did. I would have enjoyed this no matter what, but this is clearly a topic that the author loved writing about, and the narration is suffused with that enthusiasm. As enthusiastic as a book about precision engineering can be, of course - it’s a stately, restrained enthusiasm.
December 20, 2020
A 5 star above all other 5 star ratings. This book has entered my “Mt Rushmore” of favorite books. It was so incredibly enjoyable and insightful.
May 9, 2018
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester is a very highly recommended examination of the history, science, and work of precision engineers along with biographical sketches of some of the influential engineers that helped develop technology to take us from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age.
The early attention to precision, accuracy, and degrees of tolerance ushered in the the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. What truly changed the way things were made was the creation of a machine tool - a machine to make a machine - along with standardized measurements. This allowed exact, multiple items to be made that worked identically in the machine application they were made for, thus ushering in the industrial revolution and assembly lines. All these machined parts must be potentially interchangeable one for any other. This potential for interchangeable parts requires precision in many areas: mass, density, hardness, temperature tolerance, length, height, depth, and width; measurable degrees of straightness, flatness, circularity, cylindricity, perpendicularity, symmetry, parallelism, and position - and there is even more to consider.
The man who can be said to be the father of precision and the Industrial Revolution is John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson. Some of the others whose contributions are covered are: Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, Joseph Whitworth, James Clerk Maxwell, Prince Albert, Honoré Blanc, Eli Whitney, Henry Whittle, Henry Ford, Roger Lee Easton, Kintaro Hattori, and Thomas Jefferson, who saw the potential of machine tools and brought the idea to the USA, introducing the concepts that would allow manufacturing to take off.
Those who have read other nonfiction by Winchester (Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, Pacific, Atlantic, etc.) will appreciate this new educational and entertaining work that includes great stories along with scientific insight and his consistent attention to detail. As is expected, The Perfectionists is extremely well-written. Winchester takes a subject that, well, could be considered dull, and might be in lesser hands, but he makes it a compelling, engrossing subject, entertaining while giving us the history and the innovations. This is written for average people, not necessarily engineers (although engineers will appreciate it), which means even I could follow along and understand the scientific importance. The Perfectionists includes Illustrations, a Glossary, Bibliography and an Index.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/0...
The early attention to precision, accuracy, and degrees of tolerance ushered in the the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. What truly changed the way things were made was the creation of a machine tool - a machine to make a machine - along with standardized measurements. This allowed exact, multiple items to be made that worked identically in the machine application they were made for, thus ushering in the industrial revolution and assembly lines. All these machined parts must be potentially interchangeable one for any other. This potential for interchangeable parts requires precision in many areas: mass, density, hardness, temperature tolerance, length, height, depth, and width; measurable degrees of straightness, flatness, circularity, cylindricity, perpendicularity, symmetry, parallelism, and position - and there is even more to consider.
The man who can be said to be the father of precision and the Industrial Revolution is John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson. Some of the others whose contributions are covered are: Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, Joseph Whitworth, James Clerk Maxwell, Prince Albert, Honoré Blanc, Eli Whitney, Henry Whittle, Henry Ford, Roger Lee Easton, Kintaro Hattori, and Thomas Jefferson, who saw the potential of machine tools and brought the idea to the USA, introducing the concepts that would allow manufacturing to take off.
Those who have read other nonfiction by Winchester (Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, Pacific, Atlantic, etc.) will appreciate this new educational and entertaining work that includes great stories along with scientific insight and his consistent attention to detail. As is expected, The Perfectionists is extremely well-written. Winchester takes a subject that, well, could be considered dull, and might be in lesser hands, but he makes it a compelling, engrossing subject, entertaining while giving us the history and the innovations. This is written for average people, not necessarily engineers (although engineers will appreciate it), which means even I could follow along and understand the scientific importance. The Perfectionists includes Illustrations, a Glossary, Bibliography and an Index.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/0...
December 24, 2023
Despite accruing Simon Winchester's books at quite a rapid rate, I'm actually yet to read any of them. Until today.
Having now read one I think I've cracked the formula, historical Malcolm Gladwell. Winchester runs the same oscillation between anecdotes and bold statements but where Gladwell focuses on psychological anecdotes, Winchester sticks to history. In fact much like Seiko's pioneering Astron, the first quartz watch ever made, which ran off the oscillations of a quartz crystal, one could get atomic level precision with a clock set by the oscillations of Winchester's statement/anecdote binary.
I did watch an interview with him about this book and in it he mentioned that his first or most iconic The Professor and the Madman was written at breakneck pace (in about 6 weeks) and that he no longer writes like that. It sounds like the earlier ones might have more of a narrative coherency. Something this book was certainly lacking. Not that non-fiction books need to have narrative coherency just that this particular book could have used something to hold it together. There's a degree of chronology to the order of anecdotes but it's not really strong enough to hold the book together. And while each subsequent chapter has an increasingly stringent tolerance printed under the chapter number. Starting at 0.1 and ending with some ungodly amount of 0's before the 1 something like 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. It functioned more as a gimmick than a coherent feature. Many of the stories in each chapter don't match the tolerances mentioned at the start of the chapter and nor are they always "more" precise than previous stories.
In fact the biggest flaw with the book is its complete lack of precision. It needed to be far more logical in the way it hopped through developments in precision and how they're linked. Winchester needed to choose precisely the story he wanted to prove his point about precision rather than trying to fit theory to the stories he had. He seemed to just wander the globe looking for stories and then tried to tailor a narrative to fit the places he managed to visit. There's no null hypothesis he's trying to disprove, nor is there even an idea he's trying to explain.
Another weakness of the book is at times it feels more like a company history/advertisement for various companies rather than an examination of the actual engineering itself. In fact if the book's concept was changed to be a history of precision engineers it would make a lot more sense. There's also an incredible bias towards British and American engineers, often at the detriment of engineers who were years ahead in other countries.
As always with a book like this there'll be examples one thinks should have made it. I was surprised there was no mention of CERN but a whole chapter dedicated to the LIGO machine. Surely the search for the building blocks of reality mentions a merit? Could it be because the much smaller and arguably less ambitious LIGO device is in the States? It also would have been interesting to take something like a smart phone and explain how each component was a result of precision engineering in so many different fields. Again I think that's a comment on the structure. There was a real need to tie everything together.
I was glad we made it to Japan, even if that leg was seemingly sponsored by Seiko. Would have preferred more on the Shinkansen (bullet trains) and it's max of a 24 second delay across the entire network, rather than a watch factory. While Winchester started to explore the need for artisanal handcrafts in the face of ever increasing precision, I would have liked more theorising on the boundaries between the two. He delved a little bit when talking about the limits of integrated circuit boards but those limits can be reached in many fields. A discussion about at what point more precision becomes pointless would have been well worthwhile. Winchester makes the reader believe that it was crucial that every screw, bolt, and nut was individually tuned in an early Rolls-Royce, when in reality there are parts of any car that don't need that level of attention and this is true even of the mighty Rolls-Royce.
Also an investigation into what drives humans to seek increasingly precise results would have been interesting. Winchester does take us on the journey of the metre being defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, to a series of platinum rods sitting in glass cases somewhere in Paris, to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of light from a specified transition in krypton-86 and finally to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. Right at the end he makes the observation that of the 7 base SI units, 6 are now defined by time. But if that's the case why was there nothing about Atomic Clocks? We had Harrison's clocks, and rightly so, and Seiko watches, still interesting, but there should have been whole chapters on time, given it's the most important component of nearly all precision measurements.
I need to stress that a lot of the anecdotes are really interesting and Winchester is pretty good at telling stories. I don't want someone to go away thinking the book is a turd. It's not. But it could have been so much better. I think part of my problem is that last year I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and that is easily the best science non-fiction I've ever read. Even just as a study in precision engineering it greatly exceeds Winchester's effort. It's kind of like if Roger Federer turned up to your family Christmas and dominated everyone in the Family Christmas Table Tennis Championship. He's a pro tennis player but he's still better than everyone you know at table tennis as well. It's probably not fair to compare Exactly to something like The Making of The Atomic Bomb. The first is a fun plane read, the latter is a magisterial tome that requires deep focus.
If you are a precision engineer or in a related field, Exactly is not for you. If you've always wanted to read Wikipedia articles in a book format then it probably is.
If you're still on the fence, I can comfortably say that the most profound thing in the entire book is the quote by Bertold Brecht at the very beginning of the prologue.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
Having now read one I think I've cracked the formula, historical Malcolm Gladwell. Winchester runs the same oscillation between anecdotes and bold statements but where Gladwell focuses on psychological anecdotes, Winchester sticks to history. In fact much like Seiko's pioneering Astron, the first quartz watch ever made, which ran off the oscillations of a quartz crystal, one could get atomic level precision with a clock set by the oscillations of Winchester's statement/anecdote binary.
I did watch an interview with him about this book and in it he mentioned that his first or most iconic The Professor and the Madman was written at breakneck pace (in about 6 weeks) and that he no longer writes like that. It sounds like the earlier ones might have more of a narrative coherency. Something this book was certainly lacking. Not that non-fiction books need to have narrative coherency just that this particular book could have used something to hold it together. There's a degree of chronology to the order of anecdotes but it's not really strong enough to hold the book together. And while each subsequent chapter has an increasingly stringent tolerance printed under the chapter number. Starting at 0.1 and ending with some ungodly amount of 0's before the 1 something like 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. It functioned more as a gimmick than a coherent feature. Many of the stories in each chapter don't match the tolerances mentioned at the start of the chapter and nor are they always "more" precise than previous stories.
In fact the biggest flaw with the book is its complete lack of precision. It needed to be far more logical in the way it hopped through developments in precision and how they're linked. Winchester needed to choose precisely the story he wanted to prove his point about precision rather than trying to fit theory to the stories he had. He seemed to just wander the globe looking for stories and then tried to tailor a narrative to fit the places he managed to visit. There's no null hypothesis he's trying to disprove, nor is there even an idea he's trying to explain.
Another weakness of the book is at times it feels more like a company history/advertisement for various companies rather than an examination of the actual engineering itself. In fact if the book's concept was changed to be a history of precision engineers it would make a lot more sense. There's also an incredible bias towards British and American engineers, often at the detriment of engineers who were years ahead in other countries.
As always with a book like this there'll be examples one thinks should have made it. I was surprised there was no mention of CERN but a whole chapter dedicated to the LIGO machine. Surely the search for the building blocks of reality mentions a merit? Could it be because the much smaller and arguably less ambitious LIGO device is in the States? It also would have been interesting to take something like a smart phone and explain how each component was a result of precision engineering in so many different fields. Again I think that's a comment on the structure. There was a real need to tie everything together.
I was glad we made it to Japan, even if that leg was seemingly sponsored by Seiko. Would have preferred more on the Shinkansen (bullet trains) and it's max of a 24 second delay across the entire network, rather than a watch factory. While Winchester started to explore the need for artisanal handcrafts in the face of ever increasing precision, I would have liked more theorising on the boundaries between the two. He delved a little bit when talking about the limits of integrated circuit boards but those limits can be reached in many fields. A discussion about at what point more precision becomes pointless would have been well worthwhile. Winchester makes the reader believe that it was crucial that every screw, bolt, and nut was individually tuned in an early Rolls-Royce, when in reality there are parts of any car that don't need that level of attention and this is true even of the mighty Rolls-Royce.
Also an investigation into what drives humans to seek increasingly precise results would have been interesting. Winchester does take us on the journey of the metre being defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, to a series of platinum rods sitting in glass cases somewhere in Paris, to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of light from a specified transition in krypton-86 and finally to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. Right at the end he makes the observation that of the 7 base SI units, 6 are now defined by time. But if that's the case why was there nothing about Atomic Clocks? We had Harrison's clocks, and rightly so, and Seiko watches, still interesting, but there should have been whole chapters on time, given it's the most important component of nearly all precision measurements.
I need to stress that a lot of the anecdotes are really interesting and Winchester is pretty good at telling stories. I don't want someone to go away thinking the book is a turd. It's not. But it could have been so much better. I think part of my problem is that last year I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb and that is easily the best science non-fiction I've ever read. Even just as a study in precision engineering it greatly exceeds Winchester's effort. It's kind of like if Roger Federer turned up to your family Christmas and dominated everyone in the Family Christmas Table Tennis Championship. He's a pro tennis player but he's still better than everyone you know at table tennis as well. It's probably not fair to compare Exactly to something like The Making of The Atomic Bomb. The first is a fun plane read, the latter is a magisterial tome that requires deep focus.
If you are a precision engineer or in a related field, Exactly is not for you. If you've always wanted to read Wikipedia articles in a book format then it probably is.
If you're still on the fence, I can comfortably say that the most profound thing in the entire book is the quote by Bertold Brecht at the very beginning of the prologue.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
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