SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2018
Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of
the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow
us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson.
Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged
and essential component of our modern social, mercantile,
scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we
value in our daily lives – a camera, phone, computer, bicycle,
car, a dishwasher perhaps – all sport components that fit
together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also
assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet
whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are
not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision
is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern
world? Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through
stories of precision’s pioneers. Exactly takes us back to the
origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the
scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John
‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse
Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their
discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the
early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing
the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s
Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from
Europe, Asia and North America. As he introduces the minds and
methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores
fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the
different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and
perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many
facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value,
such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of
craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that
reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we
would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist
in society?
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