Take a photo of a barcode or cover
143 reviews for:
EXACTLY: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Simon Winchester, Simon Winchester
4.04 AVERAGE
143 reviews for:
EXACTLY: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Simon Winchester, Simon Winchester
4.04 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
https://boklaadan.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/perfektionisterna/
Perhaps the best way to sum up my bravos and boos about this book: it should have been a podcast.
Episodic, anecdotal, fun sometimes and boring others, informal but also rife with confusingly local/idiomatic word choices.
The structure of focusing on stories of greater precision works incredibly well, though.
Episodic, anecdotal, fun sometimes and boring others, informal but also rife with confusingly local/idiomatic word choices.
The structure of focusing on stories of greater precision works incredibly well, though.
I could not get hold of the writer's writing style. Winchester weaved too much in and out of informative historical writing and pop culture novelist. Too many poetic devices for a book described to be a display of some of the greatest perfectionist of our time.
informative
inspiring
Very interesting read. Someone from a technical /mechanical background will really enjoy it
This is a quite fascinating book in the vein of "I didn't know that!" which makes you appreciate precision engineering.
The story of precision starts at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the author selects interesting stories about each leap in precision. Some of the stories were very fascinating for me, such as the atomic clock, chip manufacturing, guns, steam engines and such but the entire book is dragged down by the length of the book. This is due to the author putting in personal stories from his life and how he was affected by some bit of precision engineering, which sometimes help putting it into a more relatable context, other times it just feels like rambling. The author also spends so many words trying to not make the content dry but it feels like he has overshot his target at times trying to make it read like a novel. And lastly some of the length comes from the amount of words it takes to describe some technical piece of machinery, all of which could have been solved with a few diagrams or pictures so that I don't have to make all of this mental gymnastics trying to figure out how some mechanical thing works.
Overall it's a quite interesting book but it will most likely be of interest to people who like the history of technology.
The story of precision starts at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the author selects interesting stories about each leap in precision. Some of the stories were very fascinating for me, such as the atomic clock, chip manufacturing, guns, steam engines and such but the entire book is dragged down by the length of the book. This is due to the author putting in personal stories from his life and how he was affected by some bit of precision engineering, which sometimes help putting it into a more relatable context, other times it just feels like rambling. The author also spends so many words trying to not make the content dry but it feels like he has overshot his target at times trying to make it read like a novel. And lastly some of the length comes from the amount of words it takes to describe some technical piece of machinery, all of which could have been solved with a few diagrams or pictures so that I don't have to make all of this mental gymnastics trying to figure out how some mechanical thing works.
Overall it's a quite interesting book but it will most likely be of interest to people who like the history of technology.
This is the story of precision engineering from precisions of .1 to 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01, or early cannons and steam engines through guns and automobiles, modern jet airplanes, then ultimately to modern microprocessors and the tools scientists are using to investigate the universe at infinite and infinitesimal scales.
I don’t think this book is perfect, but it’s pretty well written and provides a cohesive narrative of how we, as humans, have sought and achieved more and more ridiculous levels of replicable precision and how even small imperfections can cause catastrophic damage with the tolerance high performance products are designed for. It’s not at the top of my list, but it’s a pretty good read and you’ll learn a little.
I don’t think this book is perfect, but it’s pretty well written and provides a cohesive narrative of how we, as humans, have sought and achieved more and more ridiculous levels of replicable precision and how even small imperfections can cause catastrophic damage with the tolerance high performance products are designed for. It’s not at the top of my list, but it’s a pretty good read and you’ll learn a little.
I loved this book. I listened to it during my daily commute for work and enjoyed all of it. It answered questions I had like how do we know that a measuring instrument itself is accurate? What is the greatest thing by which we can measure all others?
I highly recommend this book to students, tinkerers, historians, teachers, and those who simply enjoy good storytelling. Winchester has a way of humanizing topics that would normally put most folks out cold and he makes the topics relevant and relatable. This was my first Winchester but it won’t be my last.
I highly recommend this book to students, tinkerers, historians, teachers, and those who simply enjoy good storytelling. Winchester has a way of humanizing topics that would normally put most folks out cold and he makes the topics relevant and relatable. This was my first Winchester but it won’t be my last.