A review by sarsaparillo
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
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.