The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester

the business of turning shapeless slugs of hard metal into objects of beauty and utility, each of them finely turned and neatly finished and fitted for purposes of all imaginable kinds, prosaic and exotic—for

precision, he said, is an essential component of the modern world, yet is invisible, hidden in plain sight.

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. —ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC), NICOMACHEAN ETHICS