Book Review
The Perfectionists
Simon Winchester
5/5 stars
The exactitude that allows the modern world to function
*******

All three are brilliant: the book's setup, the author, and the topic.

Simon Winchester has written a slew of best-selling books around unrelated topics; in addition to being a best-selling author/journalist, he has worn other unexpected hats before. (Field geologist, journalist / newspaper correspondent.)

Essentially, Winchester centers each of his 10 chapters around a different degree of tolerance-- the 1st chapter being the history of machines that function within a tolerance of 0.1 inches and the 9th chapter being microchips that function within tolerances near the Heisenberg limit (10^-34).

He dredges up all of the forgotten flesh and blood human beings that had to take risks in order to bring new technology to market and the geniuses that had the insights about things that we now take for granted.

Of the book:

10 chapters + prologue/afterword
308 pages of prose= x(bar) 30.8/per.
EXCELLENT glossary.

Chapters:

Prologue. Accuracy versus precision.

1. Mechanical clocks, sailing devices, cannons and steam engines. The beginning of precision was with John "Iron Mad Wilkinson.

2. Locksmiths and their unbreakable locks. Joseph Bramah. The learning of making IDENTICAL block systems was a further progress in quality control. It made the British Navy victorious over Napoleon. The mechanizing of manufacturing also put huge numbers of craftsmen out of work. (Luddites!)

3. Gun technology. Muskets were a joke. 18th century rifle was better but suffered from the problem of non-interchangeability. Americans did not initially solve that problem, but they were the first to scale it up. "Connecticut clocks" were once upon a time a thing, as clocks were a symbol of entry into the middle class.

4. Joseph Whitworth took the trouble to learn how to standardize screws / bolts. (No one had thought of that before, but it certainly turned out to be handy when it was discovered.) The farsighted leadership of Prince Albert in 1851 created the Great Exhibition, which was a reaction/ meeting space for the greatest technology of the day.

5. Henry Royce, the engineering genius. And his improvement of existing cars to make Rolls-Royce. Henry Ford, the production genius. (Absolute trade off between precision and craftsmanship.)

6. Frank Whittle conceived of the first turbine, and it took lots of trial and error to make something operate that works at unimaginably high pressures and temperatures.

7. A venture into the extremely complicated world of Optics. The Hubble telescope was meant to be designed to tolerances within 1 millionth of an inch. And it happened that lenses being off by 1/50th the width of a human hair was enough to (almost) ruin Hubble. Getting Hubble into space was a feat of engineering prowess, but it was an even bigger one set up the corrective Optics. (They had astronauts practice and do dry runs for 11 months.)

8. GPS is the Doppler effect on steroids, and it started out being able to measure to within distances almost anywhere on the planet of a couple of hundred feet, and that is now down to within distances of a six inches. (There are other, state-owned, systems: US Navstar GPS; Russian GLONASS; Pan-European Galileo; Chinese Beidou; Japanese QZSS; Indian IRNSS.)

9. The seed person of Silicon valley is the one that people want to forget. William Shockley, the Eugenicist. Also, selected thoughts on the construction and future direction of chips.

10. Brief exposition of Japanese timekeeping as well as meditations on the trade off between precision and craftsmanship.

Afterword. Derivations of the various units/fundamental units. Exposition of the trial and error nature of the process.

Second order thoughts:

1. With a nod to the Marxists: it has been said a million times before and thought countless number of times that every firm is sitting in existence and only waiting for workers to come and get it started. But, as shown by the many engineering projects here.... The brain power comes first and the workers to execute the idea come second.

2. Rolls-Royce is an excellent example of the extreme end of a dichotomy: a car company (or any other) that makes (unaffordable) goods that are engineered to the highest level of craftsmanship will actually be less profitable than a car company that makes automated affordable junk. (I don't think Ford has been taken over by anybody, and their cars were crap until just about 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Rolls-Royce turned car making into rocket science and they have been bought and sold many times.)

Mass production or craftsmanship? Pick one or the other.

3. Engineering is the very antithesis of philosophy, and engineering knowledge precedes by subtraction. Interchangeability is at the heart of all modern mass production methods, which is underpinned by precision / tolerance. It took a lot of bitter experience to figure that out.

4. War is a great promoter/accelerant of technology. And this is not the first book in which that theme has shown up. (Simon Singh showed it as a recurring feature in "The Code Book." Niall Ferguson showed the development of financial instruments--"The Ascent of Money"-- primarily to fight wars against other kingdoms.)

5. When governments outsource things to contractors, they automatically pick the lowest-priced contractor (in ignorant defiance of the Law of Common Business Balance) and they get exactly what they pay for. They saved $35 million on the lens-grinding for the $1.5 billion piece of Hubble equipment. And they ended up spending way more than that on Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement. (COSTAR).

6. There may be an absolute limit to the amount that human beings can be precise.

7. The bizarre/arbitrary metric system is something that came out of the French revolution, and is only a subset of the changes that they wanted to make. (The week was supposed to be 10 days long; the day 10 hours long; each minute 100 seconds; each second 100 minutes.) The meter itself is meant to be 140 millionth of the length of the meridian of the Earth.

A lot of people like to pretend that the SI system is "logical," but in reality there was lots of trial and error deciding what it would be. (It was not immediately apparent.)

8. History is such a whimsical thing. Japanese people appropriated the Chinese writing system (in some sense), and yet they have a sense of craftsmanship that China has never had in its long history. (A lot of Chinese paper making arts have been lost in China proper and preserved by Japan.) China did not even have a standardized unit of time until the Jesuits came along and set one up for them.

Great quote: "The distance in miles of 4.3 light years is 26 trillion miles. It is now known with absolute certainty that the cylindrical masses on ligo can help to measure that vast distance to within the width of a single human hair." (p.306)

Verdict: Strongly recommended. there's so many bits of information, that no human being could be expected to remember them all. But even just to remember 10% of what is here is to know a great deal. The Afterword makes the book worth a new purchase in its own right.

New vocabulary:

horologist/horology
escapement
astrolabe
orrery
astraria
armillary sphere
tangent screw
index mirror
sextant
octant
quadrant
Newcomen engine
seraglio
judder
atelier
flintlock
frizzen
clubbable
auto-icon (re: Jeremy Bentham's preserved/on display corpse)
block and tackle
pointe, ligne, pouce (measurement units)
nabob
sans-culotte
shoe last
pantograph
ormolu
metrology institute
byre
vernier scale
tea cosy
stripling
Decauville (10 horse standard car)
beer and skittles
Axminster carpet
chamfer
omnium gatherum
pediment
magneto
stanchions
pan-pan
panjandrum
coma (telescopic sense)
fathometer
chronometer
rarae aves
tocsin
sedulous
temporal extancy
tetsubin
meister
Urushi
cubit
unciae
toise
catty
cloche
ephemerides/almanacs
Fundamental units: length, time, current, temperature, intensity, amount (moles), mass.