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.

Phantom V’s crankshaft, once set spinning, could run in perpetuity.

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

Precision, by contrast, is attained when the accumulated results are similar to one another, when the shooting attempt is achieved many times with exactly the same outcome—even though that outcome may not necessarily reflect the true value of the desired end. In summary, accuracy is true to the intention; precision is true to itself.

the concepts of precision and accuracy can never be strictly applied to objects made of wood—because

LIGO is an observatory, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

For, in September 2015, almost a century after Einstein’s theory was first published, and then again on Christmas Eve that same year and then again in 2016, LIGO’s instruments showed without doubt that a series of gravitational waves, arriving after billions of years of travel from the universe’s outer edges, had passed by and through Earth and, for the fleeting moment of their passage, changed our planet’s shape.

John Wilkinson, who was denounced sardonically as lovably mad, and especially so because of his passion for and obsession with metallic iron. He made an iron boat, worked at an iron desk, built an iron pulpit, ordered that he be buried in an iron coffin, which he kept in his workshop (and out of which he would jump to amuse his comely female visitors), and is memorialized by an iron pillar he had erected in advance of his passing in a remote village in south Lancashire.

John Harrison,

Antikythera

Antikythera mechanism

remarkable creation, but not a miracle of perfection.”

John Harrison,

encaged roller bearing,

bimetallic strip, invented solely by Harrison in an attempt to compensate for changes in temperature in his H3 timekeeper, is still employed in scores of mundane essentials: in thermostats, toasters, electric kettles, and their like.

1 minute 54.5 seconds,

Also, though intending no disrespect to an indelible technical achievement, it is worth noting that John Harrison’s clockworks enjoyed perhaps only three centuries’ worth of practical usefulness. Nowadays, the brassbound chronometer in a ship’s chart room,

It was only when precision was created for the many that precision as a concept began to have the profound impact on society as a whole that it does today.

John Wilkinson,

Coalbrookdale

New Method of Casting and Boring Iron Guns or Cannon.”

Then came John Wilkinson and his new idea.

Because the gas occupies some 1,700 times greater volume than the original water,

Thomas Newcomen

Newcomen engine

“Nature has a weak side, if only we can find it out.”

These two improvements (the inclusion of a separate steam condenser and the changing of the inlet pipes to allow for the injection of new steam into the upper rather than the lower part of the main cylinder)—improvements so simple that, at this remove, they seem obvious, even though, to James Watt in 1765, they were anything but—changed Newcomen’s so-called fire-engine into a proper and fully functioning steam-powered machine. It became in an instant a device that in theory could produce almost limitless amounts of power.

Steam engine

he and Watt, though of very different temperaments, had met and befriended each other,

pedantic

“Mr. Wilkinson has bored us several cylinders almost without error, that of 50 inch diameter . . . does not err the thickness of an old shilling at any part.” An old English shilling had a thickness of a tenth of an inch.

first machine on May 4, 1776.

tolerance of 0.1 inches,

genie of accuracy was now out of the bottle. True precision was now out of the gate, and moving fast.

Joseph Bramah.

from the back of the audience stepped Joseph Bramah, who quickly fashioned a pair of instruments and opened the lock in fifteen minutes flat. A buzz of excitement went around the room: they were clearly in the presence of a most Mechanickal man.

Henry Maudslay then improved the lathe itself by many orders of magnitude—first

slide rest,

What Maudslay had done with his fully equipped lathe was to create an engine that, in the words of one historian, would become “the mother tool of the industrial age.”

public showroom display of the five-foot-long brass screw Maudslay had made on his lathe and which he had placed there, center stage, as an advertisement of his skills.

Block Mills still

So well were they made—they were masterpieces, most modern engineers agree—that most were still working a century and a half later; the Royal Navy made its last pulley blocks in 1965.

But the Block Mills are famous for another reason, one with profound social consequences. It was the first factory in the world to have been run entirely from the output of a steam engine.

Portsmouth Block Mills would turn out the required one hundred thirty thousand blocks each year, one finished block every minute of every working day, and yet it required a crew of just ten men to operate it.

minus side,

arrival of precision was not altogether welcome.

micrometer.

Maudslay’s was the last word in precision: this invention of his could measure down to one one-thousandth of an inch and, according to some, maybe even one ten-thousandth of an inch: to a tolerance of 0.0001.

Honoré Blanc.

Blanc’s

Whitney,