Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2018
Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson.
Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives – a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps – all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world?
Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision’s pioneers. Exactly takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America.
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?
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William Collins
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Simon Winchester 2018
Cover images © Getty Images
Simon Winchester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Much of the material here relating to the Tohoku Tsunami of March 2011 is taken with permission from an essay by Simon Winchester in the New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017.
Image of space on title page by Yuriy Mazur/Shutterstock, Inc.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008241766
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008241797
Version: 2018-05-01
For Setsuko
And in loving memory of my father,
Bernard Austin William Winchester, 1921–2011,
a most meticulous man
These brief passages from works by the writer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) might usefully be borne in mind while reading the pages that follow.
The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
—THE CULTURE OF CITIES (1938)
We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.
—VALUES FOR SURVIVAL (1946)
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
—MY WORKS AND DAYS (1979)
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Chapter 1: Stars, Seconds, Cylinders, and Steam
Chapter 2: Extremely Flat and Incredibly Close
Chapter 3: A Gun in Every Home, a Clock in Every Cabin
Chapter 4: On the Verge of a More Perfect World
Chapter 5: The Irresistible Lure of the Highway
Chapter 6: Precision and Peril, Six Miles High
Chapter 7: Through a Glass, Distinctly
Chapter 8: Where Am I, and What Is the Time?
Chapter 9: Squeezing Beyond Boundaries
Chapter 10: On the Necessity for Equipoise
Afterword: The Measure of All Things
Acknowledgments
A Glossary of Possibly Unfamiliar Terms
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Simon Winchester
Unless otherwise noted, all images are in the public domain.
Difference between Accuracy and Precision
John Wilkinson
Boulton and Watt steam engine
Joseph Bramah
Henry Maudslay
Maudslay’s “Lord Chancellor” bench micrometer (courtesy of the Science Museum Group Collection)
Flintlock on a rifle
Thomas Jefferson
Springfield Armory “organ of muskets”
Joseph Whitworth
Crystal Palace
Whitworth screws (courtesy of Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com)
“Unpickable” Bramah lock
Henry Royce
Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (courtesy of Malcolm Asquith)
Henry Ford
Ford assembly line
Box of gauge blocks
Qantas Flight 32 (2010 incident) (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau)
Frank Whittle (courtesy of University of Cambridge)
Turbine blades (courtesy of Michael Pätzold/Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de)
Rolls-Royce Trent engine
Qantas Flight 32 failed stub pipe diagram (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau)
Early Leica camera
Leica IIIcs
Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble mirror being polished
Null corrector
Jim Crocker (courtesy of NG Images)
Roger Easton (courtesy of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory)
Transit-system satellite (courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)
Bradford Parkinson
Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado (courtesy of Schriever Air Force Base, U.S. Air Force)
Ops room of Second Space Operations Squadron
ASML EUV photolithography machine (courtesy of ASML)
Gordon Moore (courtesy of Intel Free Press)
John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain
First Bell Labs transistor (courtesy of Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com)
Chart showing progress from Intel 4004 to Skylake (courtesy of Max Roser/Creative Commons BY-SA-2.0)
Main mirror for James Webb Space Telescope
Aerial view of LIGO Hanford Observatory
LIGO test mass (courtesy of Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab)
Seiko Building with clock in Ginza (courtesy of Oleksiy Maksymenko Photography)
Quartz watch (courtesy of Museumsfoto/Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de)
Makers of Grand Seiko mechanical watch
Bamboo creation from Met exhibit (
