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dunguyen 's review for:
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
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.