The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error. —BERTOLT BRECHT, LIFE OF GALILEO (1939)

I have a Japanese friend who works as a navigation officer on a deep-ocean research vessel in some of the most distant quarters of the northwest Pacific Ocean. On the bridge, he has a GPS annunciator that communicates with twelve of the GPS satellites—most iPhones talk to three or four—and, as a result, is able to know his position on a trackless sea to within just a couple of centimeters. Not a couple of yards, not a couple of meters, nor even a couple of feet, but a couple of centimeters, and that out in the swell and loneliness of the middle of an ocean. I remembered well the Amoco tool pusher allowing that a two-hundred-foot error at sea was good enough. When I told my Japanese friend of the sanguine attitude of the men on the rig, he laughed. Of course, he said, that was back in the sixties. But that is not what precision is about, he said. “Good enough” is absolutely not good enough. There will come a time, he then added, with his voice rising, when centimeters are simply not good enough, either, when we’ll need to know where we are at sea to within just millimeters. “There are no limits to precision, no end to the need for absolute perfection.” His words echo still, like the mantra of a new religion. Or of a cult.