📗 REVIEW: The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester
A history of precision enginering spanning the first machine-bored cannons to the reason ultra-flat planes are vital for space telescopes and jet engines.
I often joke that I am efficient, and my husband is thorough. He errs on the side of doing it “right” even if it takes forever; I err on the side of doing it fast even if it ends up a little janky. Given that I work in quality assurance I probably shouldn’t admit that out loud, but the reality is that my core skillset is “creative problem solving” and his is “doggedly running down the manual of every busted plumbing part until the sink is fixed.”
So when I picked up The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester, it was partly because I have come to enjoy the history of the exceptional industrialists who have built the modern Western lifestyle, and partly to understand my husband (and, it increasingly seems likely, my son) a little better.
It’s a great book.
One of the reasons I really liked The Perfectionists is the clever subheadings for each chapter. The book covers tolerances from 0.1 to 0.0001 to 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01 — the “near-atomic” level.
Probably the most memorable part for me was the section comparing Henry Ford (of Ford Motors, who is in large part responsible for the concept of a factory) and Henry Royce (of Rolls-Royce luxury cars, which for many years exemplified the concept of perfectionist engineering). But I suppose I should tell the story in order…
Chapter 1: Stars, Seconds, Cylinders, and Steam
The “father1 of true precision” (as opposed to fun contraptions like the Antikythera mechanism, or the big clocks that monastery2 timekeepers used) was an eighteenth-century Englishman named John Wilkinson, and he is a true “stranger than fiction” delight. A person in a novel who was so obsessed with iron as to make an iron boat, work at an iron desk, build an iron pulpit, and order that he be buried in an iron coffin would be considered to be absolutely, completely, ridiculously over the top for an example of “afraid of fairies” — but this guy really did all that (and more!) and wasn’t even afraid of fairies! He’s the one who pioneered the cast iron and boring machines vital to the steam engine, which I won’t go into much here because if you’ve managed to get to a point in your life where you’re reading this newsletter and don’t understand the significance of the steam engine, you’re just going to skim anything I have to say on the subject too.
Suffice it to say that Wilkinson built the first machine tool; machines capable of doing the precise boring work necessary for steam engines and cannon barrels to be a very specific size. These were massive, waterwheel‑driven machines built to handle heavy iron guns and cylinders, but even so — more capable of precision work than human hands.
The next guy who caught my attention was John Harrison, who invented the sea watch. He’s another guy who was around far enough back for the community to have a consensus built up around him; the consensus is that he got screwed by his government (although King George eventually came through and got him (most of) his money, Parliament and politics interfered with him winning the prize he obviously deserved for finding a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude. Harrison was a generational talent in the precision engineering field; he spent like 30 years perfecting that damn watch, in a story that reminded me less of other precision engineers and more of Rony Swennen — the guy who figured out how to breed bananas.
Like most organisms, bananas have a specific fertility rhythm — but it’s subtle enough that nobody before had figured it out. Swennen’s careful, numeric tracking of banana plants over decades — he kept at it for almost fifty years — let him breed bananas with way more seeds than they used to have. Like “two hundred instead of two” more.
I can’t even manage to exercise every day; these truly exceptionally useful-to-society men are next-level obsessed with their projects. Although they aren’t obsessed in a vacuum; this book had a lot to say about inventions that were birthed into being largely due to war.
It’s hard to imagine how we’d have our modern marvels of cars, internet, and cheap grain if not for the efforts of the British Navy during the middle of the 18th century.
Harrison’s early sea clock trials were made on Royal Naval warships of the day, warships that carried cannon in large numbers. Those cannons were made by English ironmasters, of whom John Wilkinson was among the most prominent and, as it turned out, the most inventive, too.
Basically, this chapter traces the birth of modern mechanical precision to John Wilkinson’s boring mill for cannon and steam-engine cylinders, linking it to accurate timekeeping and astronomy. Better cylinders made Watt’s steam engines efficient and reliable, and how improved clocks and astronomical observation depended on the same quest for exact measurement. Precision emerges as the enabling technology behind both industrial power and the scientific mapping of the heavens and the Earth.
Chapter 2: Extremely Flat and Incredibly Close
The development and distribution of the first really good locks (built by a guy named Joseph Bramah) were funded in large part due to French refugees from the 1789 Revolution. Specifically, by shopkeepers and homeowners who wanted to keep the French refugees out of their houses and businesses.
But Henry Maudslay was the guy who figured out how to actually build them cheap enough to sell; specifically, he’s the incredibly skilled engineer who built several different machine tools capable of doing the delicate work of making locks with interchangeable parts. I’m not experienced enough in metalworking to really viscerally grasp why it’s such a big deal whether or not he created a lathe flexible enough to craft a metal screw, but I’ve built stuff before; screws are a big deal. A method of cutting metal screws, efficiently, precisely, and quickly enables… a lot.
Maudslay — a teenager not yet finished his seven-year apprenticeship when Bramah found him — isn’t mostly known for the screw though. The most important thing he did (after he quit working for Bramah when curtly denied a raise) was figure out how to mass-produce the “block and tackle” pulleys used for hoisting sail on a warship. He worked in tandem with a guy named Brunel, who had the patent on a nifty system for mass-producing them.
What I found interesting about the book is how Maudslay is presented as the key component, although Bramah and Brunel were the ones with the ideas and the original patents. Ideas get a lot of credit in the press, but the guy who actually makes it work with skilled hands are really given a lot of screen time by this book — the author dug up several little-known figures and gave them the spotlight. As someone generally more impressed with engineers and machinists and ditch-diggers than DaVinci style doodlers, I fought that delightful.
Brunel gave Maudslay the drawings, and it took Maudslay six years to bring the designs to fruition despite the full backing of the Royal Navy. I’ve worked on enough software projects to know that the idea is just the beginning; actually building the damn thing is full of blind alleys and “ah hell” moments and “well I guess now I need to invent a way to—”
For example, Maudslay realized that a machine tool can make an accurate machine only if the surface on which the tool is mounted is “perfectly flat, is perfectly plane, exactly level, its geometry entirely exact.” Seems obvious; actually pretty tricky in practice, requiring three different planes. Really, though the flat plane comes up again several times throughout the course of the book, it’s the bench micrometer that I think Maudslay should be best known for. They called his the Lord Chancellor, because “no one would dare argue with it.”
Maudslay’s Block Mills were, by the way, the first factory in the world to be run entirely by steam engines, which is to say it ushered in a new era in terms of the sheer scope of what could be accomplished with mechanization.
Anyway, in this chapter, Winchester moved from rough early machine tools to the world of lapped surfaces, micrometers, and ultra-flat reference planes. Anchored around figures such as Joseph Whitworth and Joseph Bramah, he explains how making surfaces perfectly flat and distances exactly repeatable allowed parts to be measured and machined to previously unimaginable tolerances. This stuff underpins all later advances in precision engineering.
Chapter 3: A Gun in Every Home, a Clock in Every Cabin
By fluke, I listened to this chapter on the way to Harpers Ferry with my son, which was pretty awesome because the armory (the site of which we visited that very day) features prominently, along with guns — and at five he thinks guns are pretty cool.
To elide some details a bit, Frenchman Honoré Blanc figured out how to make rifles with interchangeable parts in 1785. This is super important because when a soldier’s gun breaks, he wants it back in working order now, not three days from now after a skilled artisan grinds down new parts to fit the rifle — by hand — at a smithy or whatever. Blanc gave a demonstration of the usefulness of these interchangeable parts to a bunch of dignitaries (including Thomas Jefferson, who was in France at the time) with a musket lock that he disassembled into springs and bolts and stuff, shook up in a box with lots of different parts, and built a working musket lock from the mixed-up pieces.
If not for Jefferson, interchangeable gun parts as an idea might have waited another century or so for someone to come up with it, because the French Revolution screwed up Blanc’s workshop and left him without a patron. But Jefferson was really impressed by the demonstration, and immediately understood the value of being able to just grab a part out of a box to fix a gun, instead of custom-forge one.
The most memorable part of the story, though, involves the first guy that the author really criticizes; the first cracks in the “this story is about perfectionists” facade begin to show, and he spends a fair amount of the book’s screentime talking about an appalling fraud: Eli Whitney, whose face is on postage stamps because he invented the hugely useful cotton gin.
But he also leveraged his reputation to defraud the American government, faked a Blanc-esque demonstration of guns with interchangeable parts, and tricked the gullible John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (among others) into thinking he had the engineering skills necessary to mass manufacture guns on American soil.
The truth is Jefferson had been hoodwinked, as had everyone else present that day. For there had been no molds, no machines for making all the parts “so exactly equal.” Whitney’s new-made factory, powered by water, not yet by steam (even though engines were readily available), had neither the tools nor the capacity to make precision-engineered pieces. Realizing this, he had instead hired a clutch of artisans, craftsmen, and told them to make the flintlock components with their own files and saws and polishers, and make them one by one, by hand—and not necessarily all the same, either, for the way he had planned his show did not allow for anyone to inspect the locks themselves, only that they fitted into the stocks.
It took eight years for the government to figure out that it was all bullshit. 1809.
In 1811, Simeon North filed a patent for the breech-loaded single-shot gun — which is much easier to load than the musket. Critically, it’s the first American gun with interchangeable parts that were really made with machine tools. Down in Harpers Ferry, John Hall used tons of gauges to make sure that they were really interchangeable. Over in Springfield, Thomas Blanchard — the guy responsible for shoe sizes — figured out how to make exactly replicable wooden blanks for all sorts of things, including gun stocks.
I love Harpers Ferry with my whole soul, so I’m going to quote the wrap-up paragraph in its entirety:
The management of the Harpers Ferry Armory was eager to try out all these new contrivances—despite its remote location, the armory was more accepting of innovation, oddly, than was the busier, bigger, older armory at Springfield, where Blanchard worked, and at which Simeon North was a regular visitor. Harpers Ferry became almost certainly the first establishment in the United States, maybe the first in the world, to employ precisional techniques and mass production to create weapons for the country’s military. To do so, it employed an array of these new technologies and ideas. It used the products of Blanchard’s gunstock machine; it also used John Hall’s milling machine, his fixtures, and his drop-forges; and its locks were made by the process invented by Honoré Blanc and perfected by Simeon North. From iron smelted in Connecticut to finished guns smelling of linseed oil (for the ashwood stock) and machine oil (for the barrel and lock), these were the first truly mechanically produced production-line objects made anywhere—they were also American and, just as Lewis Mumford had predicted, they were guns. Also, they were machine-made in their entirety, “lock, stock, and barrel.”
But anyway, the precision necessary for interchangeable parts became the foundation for mass production and consumer goods.
Chapter 4: On the Verge of a More Perfect World
This chapter kicks off with Tennyson and centers around the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace where Queen Victoria makes a long-distance bullseye rifle shot at Wimbledon. Standard gauges, machine tools, and measurement systems spread globally, building an industrial culture.
Joseph Whitworth is the star of the chapter. He figured out a bunch of useful stuff I guess, including a small-bore accurate rifle used by the Confederacy during the Civil War (the Union, ironically, found it too expensive). He figured out useful armor plating and a new kind of steel that was really useful for making guns. But mostly what stuck with me was making screws and bolts and very basic fundamental units of manufacture interchangeable and standardized and also very, very precise — instead of merely “very.”
John Wilkinson kicked us off with a machine that could bore a hole to a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch. After Whitworth, metal pieces could be made and measured to a tolerance of one-millionth of an inch. He got rich doing all this stuff, and — also hearkening back to the kickoff — built an iron billiards table. As the book points out: “When anyone today bleats about the need for a ‘level playing field,’ it is worth remembering that Joseph Whitworth was in all probability the first engineer to give us one.”
I want to share this section with you not because it contains anything in particular worth learning, but because it’s a pretty good example of the sheer enthusiasm with which the author approaches his topic. The whole book is like this, and it’s not the sort of description I can capture myself. Annie Normal is the only person I know who writes with this hilarious sort of take-the-piss hyperbolic accuracy.
He was large and bearded and oyster-eyed, rather frightening-looking—he had a face “not unlike that of baboon,” according to Jane Carlyle, the wife of Scottish social commentator Thomas Carlyle—and, besides his fearsome looks, was also known for his irascibility, his unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, his domineering manner, and (on a personal level) his relentless infidelity. But the twenty-three instruments and tools he had on show during those six months in London, though they may have lacked the luster and swash of big steam engines and thousand-spindle looms, provided a road map to what would become engineering’s future (and won their maker more medals than any other of the Crystal Palace exhibitors). Joseph Whitworth was an absolute champion of accuracy, an uncompromising devotee of precision, and the creator of a device, unprecedented at the time, that could truly measure to an unimaginable one-millionth of an inch. Before him there was precision; afterward, there was Whitworth-standard precision, and the Great Exhibition was where he made his reputation for it.
Chapter 5: The Irresistible Lure of the Highway
So as I mentioned in the beginning, Winchester juxtaposed Henry Ford’s Model T and Henry Royce’s Rolls‑Royce to examine precision in the motor age. The Model T embodies robust, “good enough” precision enabling cheap mass mobility, while Rolls‑Royce represents obsessive accuracy, quietness, and refinement at great cost. But even so, Ford and Royce are hilariously similar:
THE COMPANY THAT the world still knows by its hyphenated name, Rolls-Royce (though financial crises and corporate shenanigans of one kind or another have caused there to be all too many versions of the title) was famously founded in Manchester in May 1904. One year previously, in June 1903, and with much-less-remembered ceremony in Detroit, Michigan, the Ford Motor Company had been officially incorporated. Both companies were founded by dedicated, obsessive, oily-handed engineers, both men christened Henry, both born in modest circumstances and in the year 1863.
The chapter traces the parallels and distinctions between hand‑fitted luxury engines and automated, high‑volume car plants… and continues to trend of mildly to criticize some of the companies & brands he’s referencing.
Specifically, the way modern Rolls Royce just ain’t built like they used to be. Honestly, the most memorable part of this is the Rolls Royce road tests where the cars just go forever without any noise or manufacturing issues. But as far as “the history of car manufacturing” goes, the Founders Podcast episode about Ferrari was more compelling to me. All the old car companies have a lot in common, and not much about this chapter really surprised or interested me. Sorry.
Chapter 6: Precision and Peril, Six Miles High
Chapter six focused on jet engines and modern aviation—especially Frank Whittle’s pioneering gas turbines and the Rolls‑Royce Trent series. A bunch of my friends either love planes or actively work on building them, so I cared more here. Winchester describes the engineering of turbine blades, cooling systems, and control mechanisms operating at immense temperatures and stresses, and touches on the Qantas Flight 32 incident.
Tl;dr: microscopic imperfections can cascade into disaster, illustrating both the power and fragility of ultraprecise systems. Especially if a particular factory does a slipshod job of handling its maintenance and quality assurance.
The nice thing about this chapter is that it gives a pretty good explanation of how jet planes work… and it is much cooler than I realized. We coat steel in a microscopic layer of cold air to keep it from melting at “definitely higher than melting point of steel” temperatures! That’s incredible!
Here’s the full explanation, so I don’t bungle it by being an ignoramous:
There are scores of blades of various sizes in a modern jet engine, whirling this way and that and performing various tasks that help push the hundreds of tons of airplane up and through the sky. But the blades of the high-pressure turbines represent the singularly truest marvel of engineering achievement—and this is primarily because the blades themselves, rotating at incredible speeds and each one of them generating during its maximum operation as much power as a Formula One racing car, operate in a stream of gases that are far hotter than the melting point of the metal from which the blades were made. What stopped these blades from melting? What kept them from disintegrating, from destroying the engine and all who were kept aloft by its power? It seems at first blush so ludicrously counterintuitive: that a piece of normally hard metal can continue to work at a temperature in which the basic laws of physics demand that it become soft, melt, and turn to liquid. How to avoid such a thing is central to the successful operation of a modern jet engine.
For, very basically, it turns out to be possible to cool the blades by performing on them mechanical work of a quite astonishing degree of precision, work which allows them to survive their torture for as many hours as the plane is in the air and the engine is operating at full throttle. The mechanical work involves, on one level, the drilling of hundreds of tiny holes in each blade, and of making inside each blade a network of tiny cooling tunnels, all of them manufactured at a size and to such minuscule tolerances as were quite unthinkable only a few years ago.
The extra cool part of this is that the core way we do this hearkens back to technology the Greeks had:
There is a delicious irony here, however. For although, as one might expect, to make such a blade requires techniques displaying the very highest order of precision and computational power, they are combined with another means of manufacturing that is of the greatest antiquity. The “lost-wax method” was known to the Ancient Greeks, for whom precision was a wholly unfamiliar concept.* It is employed specifically in this case to allow the creation of the cooling tunnels within the blade; and the wax is melted out, as in Athenian days, just before the molten alloy is poured into the ceramic mold, which is now, absent the wax, busy with the network of voids for the eventual cooling air.
Definitely the coolest sciencey thing I learned about in this book.
Chapter 7: Through a Glass, Distinctly
Chapter seven chapter turns to optics: telescopes, cameras, and space observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s a not-quite-creepy anecdote about a guy who figured out Winchester’s address because of a magazine photo of his barn workspace, but for the most part Winchester explains how polishing mirrors and lenses to fantastically fine tolerances allows us to see distant galaxies or read tiny details in photographs, and how even slight errors—like Hubble’s initial spherical aberration, which I hadn’t known about at all—can cripple billion‑dollar instruments.
Chapter 8: Where Am I, and What Is the Time?
Chapter 8 was cool because I live near the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. Several of my friends work there, actually. I had no idea that GPS was ~invented here. But, like the sea watch that allowed for safe navigation of ships, GPS is military technology funded by the Navy. The American Navy this time.
If not for the Cold War satellite system, I’d have gotten a lot more lost than I already managed in New York when I was up there for a wedding (the day before I wrote this line, and in fact most of this review was written in or on the way to NYC. The L/F transfer in Manhattan is brutal). Here’s why I can play my favorite mobile game: Pokémon Go:
The U.S. Navy, at the time, was looking for a foolproof, secure, and accurate means of locating its fleet of Polaris-armed nuclear submarines, and thus was born the Doppler satellite navigation system known as Transit. A prototype satellite was successfully put into orbit in 1960, and no more than six years after McClure’s memo (seven years after the launch of Sputnik), a flotilla of U.S. Navy Transit satellites was in orbit around Earth, and the first true satellite navigation system was declared to be fully operational.
For the rest of the chapter, Winchester explores navigation and timekeeping, from marine chronometers and sextants to atomic clocks. He shows how determining longitude at sea required unprecedented temporal precision, then follows the story through radio time signals, global time zones, and satellite‑based positioning. Our modern ability to know exactly where and when we are depends on layered systems of clocks and measurements whose hidden precision quietly structures commerce, warfare, and daily life.
Chapter 9: Squeezing Beyond Boundaries
Shifting to the microscopic and quantum realms, Winchester recounts the rise of transistors, integrated circuits, and nanotechnology, where features are etched at scales of nanometers and below. He brings in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a conceptual limit, contrasting our drive for tighter tolerances with the fundamental fuzziness of matter. The chapter follows photolithography, clean rooms, and chip fabs, showing that modern computing and communication rest on engineering that pushes against physical and economic boundaries of precision.
My favorite part, though, was Shockley and Noyce — Fairchild Superconductors and the Traitorous Eight, aka the guys who founded Silicon Valley. This section stood out to me mostly because, once again, the Founders Podcast did this chunk of history a little better (Here’s the piece on Shockley, “creator of the electronic age” who was a jerk — and here’s the one on Noyce, who was really cool). For those who (like me) mostly hate podcasts, Esquire did a really great longform piece on “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”, which I read ages ago and adored.
Seriously, if you skipped this chapter and read that instead, you’d end up reading more but it’d be a lot more fun.
Except you’d miss the broader context of exactly what this level of precision means, for example:
The test masses on the LIGO devices in Washington State and Louisiana are so exact in their making that the light reflected by them can be measured to one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a proton. They can also compute with great precision the distance between this planet and our neighbor star Alpha Centauri A, which lies 4.3 light-years away.
The distance in miles of 4.3 light-years is 26 trillion miles, or, in full, 26,000,000,000,000 miles. It is now known with absolute certainty that the cylindrical masses on LIGO can help to measure that vast distance to within the width of a single human hair.
That’s crazy.
Chapter 10: On the Necessity for Equipoise
In this reflective chapter, Winchester asks whether endless pursuit of precision is unambiguously good, weighing its benefits against complexity, brittleness, and social cost.
He uses Tokyo watchmakers to demonstrate this point, and presents Japan as this weird but beautiful land that values precision and the trains running on time and clean streets and all the usual stuff Japanophiles like Craig Mod and Gwern adore… and also handmade perfect tea as opposed to perfectly perfect tea. Artisan craftsmanship isn’t dead, let’s not kill it — the book predates AI but it was an uncanny echo of the points I made in my article about how machines cannot replace the genuine human touch. A perfect circle is, in some ways, less beautiful than a beautiful unique coffee ring, or something.
The most interesting part of this chapter to me, though, was the story of how Japanese manufacturers managed to salvage an industry they’d tried to destroy, which rather reminded me of that time that Disney pulled its own hand-illustrators out of retirement to make a good animated film that they’d lost the tech for because it’s all computer generated slop now.
Except that—and this appears to be the decisive moment when a quintessentially Japanese devotion to craftsmanship was allowed to resurface—within a decade, the decision came down from the board to restart production. A halfhearted 1980s lipstick-on-a-pig attempt to make a quartz version of the Grand Seiko fizzled, whereupon the Hattoris realized, and did so without the dubious benefit of surveys and focus groups, that Japanese people had a lingering love affair with handmade mechanical watches, and would pay good money to support the kind of craftsmanship that would be necessary to make them again.
Maybe we’ll get good animated movies again soon. Disney seems to be working on it. For someone as fretful as me about “what if we lose industrial capacity because—” it was pretty reassuring, actually, that they managed to re-train and re-build the capacity to handmake artisan watches.
I love a book with a happy ending :)
Of course there were other guys around the same time who did similar stuff, there often are, but John Wilkinson is the guy the “engineering fraternity” has settled on as the progenitor.
Calendars, which long predate clocks, are as far as I know, another example of something that priests managed long before secular authorities took control of it. But this isn’t the place for another lengthy article about practical religion and the historical value of priests as experts.