God Stands Up For Geeks In Winchester’s Latest

Simon Winchester is a crack storyteller, as anyone who has read “The Professor and the Madman” will remember, and a sharp-eyed researcher who finds bright nuggets of information in odd corners of our dusty past.

In “The Perfectionists,” Winchester gives us an account of modern history as the achievement, from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, of an ever-increasing degree of precision. We travel the great arc from steam engine to smartphone, introduced along the way—in true Winchester style—to the various characters who carried the story forward, through their obsessive dedication, their flashes of insight, and their force of will.

Thus we meet “Iron-Mad Wilkinson,” who, in the mid-1700s, devised a better way of making cannons for the British navy, by boring a hole into a solid cylinder of metal. And we are there when he befriends James Watt, who has freshly reimagined the steam engine only to find his prototype always enveloped in a dank cloud of steam, which leaks from its main cylinder. The problem, of course, is that the hammered iron sheets of the metal cylinder fit imprecisely around the piston, and the answer—it instantly occurs to Wilkinson—is to make the cylinder using his cannon-boring technique. The resulting assembly was true, Watt boasted, “to the thickness of an English shilling,” or one tenth of an inch, for a piston three feet in diameter, a standard unimaginable to earlier craftsmen.

We are on hand again when a young locksmith’s apprentice, Henry Maudslay, a contemporary of Wordsworth, strikes out on his own and wins a contract to make pulleys for the British navy. But though already renowned as a craftsman, he opts not to make the pulleys himself, as generations of craftsmen have done before him, but to make a series of machines that will make the parts of a pulley for him. This, as Winchester illustrates, was a key moment in the history of technology. The results were far more uniform and reliable than an army of craftsmen could produce. And from then on, craftsmanship acquired an aura of irrelevance and authenticity. The new, super-craftsmen worked, like Henry Maudslay, at one remove from the object of manufacture, designing the machine tool that would make the object in their stead.

The machine tool would also lead to standardization, interchangeability and assembly-line manufacture, more familiar waypoints in the through line of technology, illustrated by the manufacture of guns in the Connecticut Valley, automobiles and cameras, with precision increasing by orders of magnitude at every step.

Along the way, we learn about Winchester’s bona fides in the field. His father worked, in the years after World War II, as a precision engineer, and Winchester recounts his early memories of his father’s dinner-table wizardry. He himself began in life as a petroleum engineer and gives an entertaining account of having to position a drill rig over a salt dome on the floor of the North Sea in the dark days before GPS. But we begin to suspect much earlier in the book, during a lengthy excursus on the distinction between “precision” and “accuracy,” supported by quotations and diagrams, that Winchester harbors his own deep core of geekdom under his outward verve and charm—an impression amply confirmed by his narration of the successive lenses with which he accessorized his trusty Leica M6.

When Winchester is on his game, however, as he is in discussing the jet engine, satellite navigation or the mind-boggling miniaturization of the transistors packed into our smartphones, you could not ask for a better guide. “The Perfectionists” is good entertainment and, at the same time, a provocative reordering of the relevant past. This is the story of how we arrived at our present ability to imprint billions, literally billions, of transistors onto a single chip.

 

 Simon Winchester will read from “The Perfectionists” (Harper Collins: New York 2018) at The White Hart Speakers Series on June 14, 6 p.m. 15 Undermountain Rd., Salisbury, CT. 860-435-0030. 

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