Simon Winchester – The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

Simon Winchester – The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

After a brief appreciation of the notion of precision and how it differs from accuracy, Winchester begins with the story of longitude and John Harrison’s precision clocks. The general organizational theme of the book is chronological, with engineers’ precision capabilities increasing over time.

Winchester is at his best in the lengthier middle chapters. In one, he compares two different kinds of precision—those espoused by Henry Ford and by Rolls Royce. In a Ford assembly line, workers needed almost no skill to fit the precision-made interchangeable parts together in mass quantity on the precisely designed assembly line. The handmade Rolls Royce instead emphasized that every aspect of the car must be hand-made to the most exacting precision by the world’s most skilled craftsmen, to the point that its factory could muster just two cars per day, compared to a new Model T every 40 seconds at Ford’s factory.

His chapter about the birth of the jet engine and the mind-boggling precision needed for its fan blades and other parts is similarly excellent. And the chapter on optics, beginning with how lenses are made and climaxing with the story of the Hubble Space Telescope, its initial blurry pictures due an almost unthinkably small mistake, and its 1993 repair done in space, is also a tour de force.

From there, Winchester goes into the history of the transistor, which nowadays requires atomic precision. Before too long, quantum computers may bring precision requirements down to the quantum realm. The book ends by returning to timekeeping. John Harrison’s famous H-4 clock has since been surpassed by atomic clocks and time-based GPS systems so precise they must take the theory of relativity into account.