samferree's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Simon Winchester has a gift for writing books about my niche, weird obsessions, and this is one of them. The book explores the history of the concepts of precision and accuracy, ideals that did not really exist before the Industrial Revolution, mass production, capitalism, and ubiquitous technology, but they now define the world we live in and how most people understand it.
statman's review against another edition
3.0
I like Simon Winchester books and this one is another good one in his collection. Interesting take on how technology has advanced in our ability to measure ever more precisely. Wide range of examples from manufacturing, airplane engines and more.
7anooch's review against another edition
5.0
This is a wonderful book that gave me a newfound appreciation for engineering. I learned a lot. I will say that this book should be read and not listened to.
dmturner's review against another edition
5.0
An elegant, exuberant, well researched book about a topic I would never have thought I would find fascinating. The development of the topic from chapter to chapter is logical and always surprising, and the concluding chapter on the desirable persistence of imperfection was unusually good for such conclusions. The afterword on measurement, while certainly informative, struck me as unnecessary.
binstonbirchill's review against another edition
4.0
I won a free advanced copy of this book through Goodreads giveaways.
As someone who knows basically nothing about engineering it comes as a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I never felt it got bogged down into too much detail of engineering itself, rather, the book shows the history of engineering, specifically, precision engineering. From humble beginnings to the quite absurd present computing technology, this books shows the growth of precision and what it has meant for various industries and companies. I found the chapter on the Hubble telescope and computer chips particularly interesting. A good read no matter what your level of engineering know-how.
As someone who knows basically nothing about engineering it comes as a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I never felt it got bogged down into too much detail of engineering itself, rather, the book shows the history of engineering, specifically, precision engineering. From humble beginnings to the quite absurd present computing technology, this books shows the growth of precision and what it has meant for various industries and companies. I found the chapter on the Hubble telescope and computer chips particularly interesting. A good read no matter what your level of engineering know-how.
bu77trout's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
4.25
An interesting and novel take on history: The history of precision engineering. The author talks about all the expected developments cars, airplanes, computers, but throws in a few curveballs here and there. Occasionally he starts to get into the weeds and it becomes a bit tedious for the layman but usually pulls the reader right back out with a charming story or something unexpected. It ends reflectively, neatly tying the themes together with a thread through time, from the early industrial revolution, to the present day, and into the not so distant future.
sarsaparillo's review against another edition
3.0
This book tells the history of precision engineering really as a series of magazine articles: vignette profiles of people, or, more often, corporations in the manufacturing sector. It's interspersed with usually entertaining autobiographical anecdotes, mind-boggling mental images, and some somewhat tedious philosophical musing.
The book proceeds mostly chronologically via an amusing conceit of finer and finer tolerances, with each chapter title being tinier and tinier fractions of an inch. The author-narrated audiobook I listened to includes Winchester reading out something like 24 "zeros" after the decimal point before he reaches the significant digit.
You'll be taken on a tour of Elizabethan England, the Colonial US, back to England, France, England again. Mainly England really, industrial powerhouse for so long. Oh and those precision junkies in Japan. A surprising amount of the book consists of corporate histories of firms pioneering in ever-more-exquisite precision: Rolls Royce, Leica, Seiko, Intel. And if it's not captains of industry, it's the military, that other realm of technological perseverance.
Winchester relishes in the incomprehensibility and absurd complexity of some of history's the greatest engineering achievements. The chapter on turbine engines, framed around the story of one engine that catastrophically failed mid-flight, is particularly vivid and wondrous.
Things only get more unfathomable (and Winchester somewhat redundantly points out continuously) as he paints a picture of the semiconductor industry ferociously striving to squeeze more and more transistors into a smaller and smaller place, burrowing up against the very fundamental limits of the physical universe. "There are more transistors at work on this planet, some 15 quintillion them, than there are leaves on all the trees in the world."
In a few places - including the final chapter before the afterword - he opines that in all this striving for precision, isn't there something to be said for the value of the imprecise, and might we be too addicted to precision? Maybe so, but despite raising these questions regularly, and seeming to answer in the affirmative, he doesn't really follow through with an argument as to why. Beyond pointing out that there is still a small elite market for hand-crafted goods, which, in some cases, such as mechanical watches, are clearly functionally inferior to their cheaper ultra-precise production-line alternatives.
Stay for the afterword on the history of standards of measurement, which is for the most part a comic history of the never-quite-good-enough standard meter. But this is wrapped up with what I found a more satisfying ending than the final chapter, a poignant little story of a very special apple tree in Beijing and a feeling of fondness for the world's precision nerds, and their now international collaboration, to set the world exactly straight.
The book proceeds mostly chronologically via an amusing conceit of finer and finer tolerances, with each chapter title being tinier and tinier fractions of an inch. The author-narrated audiobook I listened to includes Winchester reading out something like 24 "zeros" after the decimal point before he reaches the significant digit.
You'll be taken on a tour of Elizabethan England, the Colonial US, back to England, France, England again. Mainly England really, industrial powerhouse for so long. Oh and those precision junkies in Japan. A surprising amount of the book consists of corporate histories of firms pioneering in ever-more-exquisite precision: Rolls Royce, Leica, Seiko, Intel. And if it's not captains of industry, it's the military, that other realm of technological perseverance.
Winchester relishes in the incomprehensibility and absurd complexity of some of history's the greatest engineering achievements. The chapter on turbine engines, framed around the story of one engine that catastrophically failed mid-flight, is particularly vivid and wondrous.
Things only get more unfathomable (and Winchester somewhat redundantly points out continuously) as he paints a picture of the semiconductor industry ferociously striving to squeeze more and more transistors into a smaller and smaller place, burrowing up against the very fundamental limits of the physical universe. "There are more transistors at work on this planet, some 15 quintillion them, than there are leaves on all the trees in the world."
In a few places - including the final chapter before the afterword - he opines that in all this striving for precision, isn't there something to be said for the value of the imprecise, and might we be too addicted to precision? Maybe so, but despite raising these questions regularly, and seeming to answer in the affirmative, he doesn't really follow through with an argument as to why. Beyond pointing out that there is still a small elite market for hand-crafted goods, which, in some cases, such as mechanical watches, are clearly functionally inferior to their cheaper ultra-precise production-line alternatives.
Stay for the afterword on the history of standards of measurement, which is for the most part a comic history of the never-quite-good-enough standard meter. But this is wrapped up with what I found a more satisfying ending than the final chapter, a poignant little story of a very special apple tree in Beijing and a feeling of fondness for the world's precision nerds, and their now international collaboration, to set the world exactly straight.