Book Review: The Perfectionists

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Simon Winchester
Science, engineering, history

This is one of Simon Winchester's better books, all the more so because he takes a really original  perspective on Modernity and How It Got That Way. On the one hand, The Perfectionists is chock-full of intriguing facts about everything from jet engines to camera lenses. On the other hand, it's also a paean to a bunch of extraordinary characters. And on the other other hand, it's well-tied together by its theme.

Precision is one of those things, like rust, that's so incredibly important that nobody thinks about it. That is: it's so important that we've had to get very, very sophisticated at it--so sophisticated that it's largely invisible. A couple hundred years ago, James Watt found that he needed a then-unheard-of level of precision to make his steam engines work . . . whereupon divers other actors discovered that such precision let them do, or almost do, amazing things . . . which led to a need for more precision . . . which led, ultimately, to things like Moore's Law . . . which led to people in third-world countries throwing away two-year-old cell phones with enough processing power to launch a space-shuttle because they're too old and slow.

Thought-provoking, no? And the writing is good, too: lively, vivid, and readable. Winchester is not at his best when he tries to be profound--there's a chapter on Japan, as an alleged conundrum, that's basically one big mistake--but for telling details he's one of the best.

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Winchester got to visit one of the most precise things in the solar system, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which shows up in a lot more detail in Ripples in Spacetime. For other good books about important stuff that nobody thinks about, see Rose George's The Big Necessity and Mark Levinson's The Box.