Pursuit of precision skillfully traced
Simon Winchester’s fascinating study of some of the people who have made today’s technology possible begins in the not-toodistant past.
According to the author of “The Professor and the Madman,” whose father was an engineer who worked on secret government projects in Great Britain, precision engineering was born during the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century, under the auspices of John “IronMad” Wilkinson, whose method for boring cannon barrels was adopted by the far better-known James Watt for his steam engines.
Wilkinson’s technique achieved a tolerance — defined by Winchester in a useful “glossary of possibly unfamiliar terms” as “the permissible variation in size from a specified standard allowed for a machined part” — of 0.1, or a 10th of an inch.
His chapter, and each • “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World” (Harper, 416 pages, $29.99) by Simon Winchester
thereafter, is headed by the tolerance reached, which rises from 0.00001 for the kind of gun used in the War of 1812 to a “1” preceded by a dizzying 34 zeroes for the contemporary production of computer chips.
Winchester, wisely, makes no attempt to be comprehensive in his study, instead exploring in depth several key moments in precision engineering.
Often he begins a chapter with a personal or dramatic story and then circles down into the details of his subject, paying equal attention to the people who crafted the “machines that make machines” instrumental.
A chapter on global-positioning systems opens with his memories of working on a tugboat in the North Sea, attempting to place an oil rig in the proper position with the use of “a big red X.”
Another chapter on jet engines begins with a suspenseful account of the spectacular engine failure of Qantas Flight 32 in 2010. The Airbus A380 — the largest passenger aircraft — made an emergency landing in Singapore with no passenger injuries.
The jet-engine chapter goes on to explore the many challenges of cooling “the ultraprecise but still Hadean nightmare that is the interior of a modern jet engine.”
Although many of the people that the author highlights might be unfamiliar, one of the more intriguingly structured chapters focuses on two well-known people — Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co., and Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls-Royce.
Winchester contrasts Royce’s careful, handmade approach, in which two cars were produced a day, with Ford’s innovative production line, which allowed the production of more than 16 million Model Ts in the 19 years the car was sold.
He also makes the point that although it would seem that the “enormously comfortable, stylish, swift, and comprehensively memorable” Rolls-Royces would demand more precision, actually the Fords did, because the production lines demand “a limitless supply of parts that were exactly interchangeable.”
While engineers will enjoy this tribute to their art, non-engineers might be even more captivated by Winchester’s clear explanations and provocative asides.