Poets of Exactitude
A best-selling author credits the efforts of meticulous inventors for propelling today’s prosperity.
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
By Simon Winchester
Harper Collins. 2018. 416 pages.
More than a series of enjoyable biographies, this paean to precision celebrates the iconoclasts who profoundly understood the beauty of a perfect system—whether a work tool, component, or timepiece—as well as the discoveries and joy inherent in the struggle to create one. From automobiles to flintlock rifles, the Hubble Telescope, GPS, and Seiko watches, The Perfectionists examines the quest for exactitude and the meticulous craftsmanship that spawned these and other game-changing products.
We learn, for example, that Henry Royce, a mechanical tinkerer who got his start with industrial cranes, did not need to make each component of each model of his Silver Ghost sedan by hand. Rather, as best-selling author Simon Winchester reports, he was “quite simply committed to building for the discerning few the finest motorcars in the world, no matter the difficulty and with no concern for cost.” His factory produced all of five Silver Ghosts a day. By contrast, Henry Ford wanted Everyman to afford his wheels and engineered for the 99 percent. Yet precision also was paramount to Ford’s manufacturing, particularly in ensuring accuracy on his Model T assembly line. Similar studies of those who “work to get it right” form an engaging and informative narrative. Short-listed for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, the most prestigious award in the field, The Perfectionists—titled Exactly! in Great Britain—is the perfect read for engineers.
Winchester, a seasoned journalist, admits that the search for precise working systems is no new thing: The complexity of hand-cut gears on the Greek Antikythera mechanism dates to the second century BCE. Yet while the intricate gear work could function as a clock, it was likely never used to parse hours, minutes, and seconds and instead aligned with planetary movements to (imprecisely) track the stars. Precise machinery and “precision engineering” only really took off in the 18th century, Winchester argues, as railways and shipping navigation began to demand more accurate timing and location. In 1735, horologist John Harrison solved the challenge of longitude, a puzzle famously “outsourced” to the public by the British government. Today, Harrison’s first timekeeper is one of three enormous Harrison clocks still maintained by the Greenwich Royal Observatory, wound daily at dawn to maintain their nearly perfect accuracy. “The Ancients may have looked upward to the skies to gather what time it was,” writes Winchester, “but once machinery began to perform the same task, a vast range of devices took over the duty, and has done so ever since.”
Chapters of the book explore a history of precision engineering from the creation of the slide rest and first mechanized iron factories of 19th-century Britain to flintlocks and screw threads, jet turbines and quantum mechanics, Sputnik, transmitters, and global positioning systems. Throughout, Winchester demonstrates how increasing levels of precision have helped advance science and engineering. Yet he also contemplates the costs of precision. At one point, the navigation officer of a deep-ocean research vessel, who employs in his daily work a high-powered GPS annunciator, offers his belief that “there are no limits to precision, no end to the need for absolute perfection.” His words resonate for Winchester, musing that they sound “like the mantra of a new religion. Or of a cult.” Elsewhere, the author wonders if, in other universes, “precision can be further and further refined, with no end to its limits in sight.”
Winchester finds a kind of answer in Japan, a country where precision is often regarded as high art, whether in machines, buildings, or a rail system timed to seconds. In 2017, he notes by way of example, a 20-second early departure prompted a humbled public apology from the national rail company. Yet the Japanese also deeply value traditional handmade crafts—pottery, silk kimono, lacquerware, and bamboo baskets—whose aesthetics defy hard lines and precision. Is it possible to balance the values of precision and imprecision, Winchester asks, and to recognize the beauty of human and natural imprecision? He concludes with a suggestion “to accept the equal significance, the equal weight of the natural order” even as engineers continue striving for that next edge of perfection.
Review by Robin Tatu
Robin Tatu is Prism‘s book editor.
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