1776 is celebrated as the birth of a nation, but as science writer Simon Winchester demonstrates in his latest book, the most important birth that year concerned the advent of precision. The nascent technology of steam engines required components that reproduced identical outcomes and in 1776, a mad Englishman called John Wilkinson perfected the machine-tooled process that became essential to the Industrial Revolution. As The Perfectionists reminds us, the technology we enjoy today depends on precision. Winchester is a good storyteller with a novelist’s gift for description. He’s also a philosopher who wonders about fetishizing perfection and the possible dead end of nano-perfectionism. As for artisanship, he adds that only metal, glass and ceramic objects can be precise. Wooden things swell and contract—“it is a substance still fixed in the natural world.”
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