Pun Salad

An interesting, somewhat quirky, history of technological progress viewed through the lens of the concept of precision: how things are manufactured just so the myriad pieces fit together just right, and everything just works. It's probably an underappreciated story, especially if you've ever tried to put something together yourself, and … yeah, my talents are not in that area at all.

It's a collection of interesting stories, roughly in chronological order; they don't exhaust the topic, but that's OK. The author, Simon Winchester, is a journalist, and has a good eye for the interesting detail, the flamboyant personality, the quiet heroism involved in "getting it right".

Topics discussed, among many: the Antikythera device (amazingly precise, totally inaccurate); locks and keys; mass production of personal weaponry; the different approaches to car manufacturing taken by Rolls-Royce and Ford; the near-disaster of the Hubble Space Telescope and its heroic rescue; clocks and watches; integrated circuits; the progress of metrology, defining standards of mass, length, and time.

And probably the most precise piece of equipment in history: the LIGO gravity wave detector.

It's all written well, and, if you're interested in technology at all, pretty darn gripping.

No tech expertise is assumed of the reader. In fact the one bit of math is botched; Winchester says (p. 349) that a simple pendulum's period is given by the formula

T = 2π√lg

Oops, Simon. Make that

T = 2π√l/g