Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
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!