Exactly

by Simon Winchester

  * As well as the Lincoln—and the electric starter motor, which he built after his best friend was knocked out and killed by the unexpected kickback of a large car’s starting crank.

  * Whittle, only half joking, blamed his prejudice against piston engines on his catalog of motorcycle accidents, which culminated in his failure to stop at a T junction outside London and being catapulted into the woods, and then having his insurance canceled and his ruined bike repossessed by the finance company. Whittle was not a man to blame himself for mishaps, and instead blamed the motorcycle engine for taking him so uncontrollably fast.

  * As might be expected, high panjandrums in the prewar scientific civil service took differing views of Whittle’s proposals: a man named Harry Wimperis took against the idea—“Many had burned their fingers on gas-turbine projects and I don’t suppose you will be the last,” he remarked caustically to a Power Jets investor—but Wimperis’s senior, the legendary Henry Tizard, was very much a supporter, and ultimately it was Tizard’s view that prevailed. Tizard and Wimperis famously later worked together on the invention of radar. If Wimperis was skeptical of jet propulsion, it was but a temporary aberration: he was more generally an open-minded figure, as befits a recipient of a Whitworth Scholarship at Cambridge, named for the great Victorian engineer who was central to the story of precision a hundred years before.

  † Whittle had approached BTH with his ideas some years before, but it turned him down flat. Now that he had financial backing, BTH was persuaded to take a chance and build a prototype.

  * The firm had been established as the Gloucestershire Aircraft Company Limited in 1917, but changed its name to Gloster because many foreign customers found the original spelling too difficult to pronounce.

  * Rolls-Royce started making aircraft engines in 1915, little more than a decade after launching its first motorcar. The firm branched into jet engines in 1946, and in the early 1950s, the Avon was used to power the Canberra bomber for the Royal Air Force and the ill-fated Comet for British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC. Despite many stumbles, including bankruptcy and nationalization (later reversed), the company, making aero engines for more than a century, remains a formidable player in the jet engine market, having made some fifty thousand thus far.

  * The first Rolls-Royce engine to employ this kind of blade cooling, in the late 1960s, was the RB211, which proved to be so costly to develop that it brought the company to insolvency, and to its nationalization for seven years by the British government. One of the early problems came about from the use of carbon fiber blades for the main external fan. By regulation, these had to be tested for resistance to bird strikes. A cannon fired a five-pound chicken at the spinning blades, which, to universal dismay, promptly shattered into thousands of pieces. These blades were replaced eventually with compressor blades made of titanium, but this took time and money and, for a while, cost the company its livelihood.

  However, the RB211 did eventually outperform its main American competitor, the Pratt and Whitney JT9D, used in early jumbo jets. NASA statistics show that, in the 1970s, the JT9D had an average of one engine shutdown per transatlantic flight, whereas the RB211 had one shutdown every ten crossings. It was fortunate the aircraft had four engines, and that the passengers never came to know.

  * Except, perhaps, to the makers of the Antikythera mechanism, mentioned in chapter 1, which, though it has the look of a high-precision instrument, manages to be wholly lacking in accuracy. It was made, however, more than two thousand years ago, so its makers can perhaps be forgiven.

  * Even Richard Feynman, everyone’s favorite twentieth-century polymath, who won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics, famously asserted, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

  * The f number of a lens, seldom explained, is essentially a measure of how much light can get from the outside world into the inside of a camera. The number is very simply calculated by dividing the focal length of the lens (i.e., the distance from the center of the lens to where it focuses light on the film, or the sensor, in the back of the camera) by the diameter of the opening in the lens. A Brownie 127 lens with a focal length of 65 mm would need to have, in order to have its f number 14, a fixed aperture about 4 mm across.

  † My late father entirely approved of the purchase of this camera, as Johann Voigtländer’s company, though originally Viennese, had moved during the political turmoil of 1848 to the German city of Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony, and my father felt a long-standing affection for this city, despite (maybe because of) his having been incarcerated there as a prisoner of war during the closing months of World War II. “Damn good engineers, those Saxons,” he harrumphed, and handed me ten pounds, as I remember, for the camera that set off a lifetime loyalty to 35 mm film and format. Voigtländer lenses made in the late nineteenth century were all constructed to the greatest mathematically determined precision, and were very fast and highly accurate—it remains one of the tragedies of German photography that this pioneering firm had to be wound up in 1972. Cameras and lenses are still made under the Voigtländer name, but under license by a Japanese company.

  * From the Japanese word for “blur,” boke, or the “quality of blur,” boke-aji, bokeh is nowadays a much-courted aspect of optical quality that deals with how a lens manages the out-of-focus parts of an image—whether it renders them in an attractive or an ill-considered manner. The fact that modern photographers are so fascinated by bokeh is a reminder that lens sharpness is most certainly not the most valuable quality of a good lens—lightness, versatility, speed, and bokeh are all of greater moment to photographic artistry than the ability to make a picture filled with fine detail. The circle of confusion is a term of art and a related topic, dealing with the precisional aspect of photographic depth of field.

  * Niépce and his cohort stuck with just one element, probably glass, and initially simply convex on both sides. Two years after his first experiments with asphalt and lavender oil, he did, however, warm to the use of meniscus lenses, which had a concave side facing out and a convex side closer to the film. Niépce also worked to keep the pinhole of his camera obscura very small and centered on the lens so that only its nonaberrant center would be employed to collect imagery and so make pictures.

  * … though some in Europe might well rather cite Herschel. Few today can possibly gainsay the astronomical achievements of this remarkable telescope-wielding family, three generations descended from an oboe-playing soldier and former gardener from Germany, but who themselves fled to and settled and performed most of their stargazing in England. William and Caroline Herschel, siblings, were the first to win fame—he for discovering the planet Uranus in 1781; she—hitherto a quite uneducated maidservant—for helping her brother discover more than a score of comets and some twenty-five hundred nebulae. The image of the pair spending nights grinding and polishing lenses and mirrors to such a degree of precision as was attainable in the mid-eighteenth century lingers still in the annals of astronomy’s charms. William’s son, John Herschel, was to become so revered a scientist—polymathic but supreme in sky-searching—that he was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Sir Isaac Newton (the common man may bless him for his interest in cameras, and his invention of the terms positive, negative, snap-shot, and photographer). He was also happily fertile: his fifth child (of twelve) and second son, Alexander, was himself no mean astronomer, and would become a professor, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a leading authority on meteorites.

  * NASA has now all but completed a vastly more powerful (and at eight billion dollars, much costlier) device, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to be launched from the European spaceport in French Guiana, in April 2019. The telescope will float almost a million miles from Earth, well beyond the reach of any shuttle-hoisted repair teams; consequently, its manufacture, and the planning of the deep-space maneuvers that have to be successfully accomplished before it can make a single observation, are being rehearsed over and over, to ensure that every
thing works down to the finest detail.

  * The four observatories, were they to act in concert, seek to observe the universe through a considerable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum—Hubble, the best known, investigating all the way from ultraviolet to the near-infrared, by way of the entirety of the visible spectrum. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, sent into orbit aboard a shuttle in 1991, looked at violent and high-energy events out in space, those that emitted bursts of gamma rays. In 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, also dropped from a shuttle, looks at X-ray emissions from black holes and quasars. Finally, in 2003, a Delta rocket took the Spitzer Space Telescope up into high solar orbit, from where it observes thermal infrared emissions, invisible from Earth because the very short wavelengths (as low as three microns) cannot penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory reentered the atmosphere and is no more: the remaining three are still working like a charm.

  * Monetary matters are rather beyond the scope of this story, except that, to this day, employees of the shamed company insist that corners cut because of a lack of money were a principal cause of the mistakes made. NASA was uncertain that the firm could do the job for 70 million, but agreed to the lowball offer—the firm underbid Kodak, for instance, by a stunning 35 million—and winked at the arrangement, saying they could wheedle any additional funds from Congress later. Yet, later, Congress balked, and Perkin-Elmer had to try to make the mirror with the money it had, and of which it had demanded so little for the sole purpose of winning the contract and so enhancing its reputation. As we now know, exactly the opposite happened: the firm’s reputation was left in tatters, and it had to pay NASA a hefty sum in compensation for its incompetence. It has changed ownership twice, and is now part of United Technologies.

  * It is easy to forget that many years went by after the mirror was completed—the Challenger disaster and innumerable technical delays in the manufacturing of the rest of the Hubble telescope pushed the launch date back, and back, and back. Meanwhile, the mirror system was kept in storage at Lockheed.

  * The saying was first brought to public attention in the mid-seventeenth-century anthology Jacula Prudentum, assembled by George Herbert, the saintly (and wealthy) vicar of the quaintly named church of Fugglestone St. Peter, a few miles from the cathedral city of Salisbury. The full proverb reads, “For want of a nail, the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the horse is lost; for want of a horse the rider is lost; for want of a rider the battle is lost; for want of a battle the kingdom is lost.” The same anthology also offered the suggestion, of a fierce man, that “his bark is worse than his bite.” Hitherto they were believed equivalent.

  * Endeavour is spelled in the British style because it memorializes Captain James Cook’s flagship. The name of the orbiter (built to replace the lost Challenger) was chosen through a national school contest, which was won by classes based in Mississippi and Georgia.

  * Before Decca and LORAN and long before GPS, the combined use of a sextant and a good chronometer enabled a skilled mariner to find his position at sea with a fair degree of accuracy. As a very unskilled sailor of a small schooner in the Indian Ocean in 1985, and under the supervision of a practiced Australian skipper, I managed, by using just these tools, together with a good set of charts and a ready-reckoning log towed astern, to sail unaided the 1,300 miles from Diego Garcia to Mauritius. My daily on-voyage accuracy was seldom better than a couple of miles, but finally seeing the four white flashes of the Flat Island light off the port bow late one night, and realizing we were just a few miles north of Mauritius itself after ten days’ sailing across an empty ocean, also remains for me, just as with the oil rig of twenty years before, a powerful memory of navigational success.

  * However robust the system may have been, it did not entirely survive some very poor planning and decision making by a sister agency of the U.S. government, the Atomic Energy Commission. The navy’s Transit 4B satellite was launched in June 1961 and was sashaying quietly along its planned orbit, sending out its signals with impeccable regularity. However, a little more than a year later, the AEC launched a rocket with a powerful hydrogen bomb in its nose cone, which exploded as planned four hundred miles above Earth, near Hawaii. The AEC had forgotten to check, and it blew the poor little Transit out of the sky, one of several orbiting bodies that were damaged or destroyed that summer night. It also knocked out streetlights in Honolulu. Only the New Zealand Air Force was pleased, as the explosion lit up the South Pacific for a sufficient time to allow aircraft on exercise to find their target submarines. The exercise planners later claimed this was cheating.

  * Brad Parkinson’s air force career was deeply involved in the “automated battlefield” idea, with a special interest in the formidably armed AC-130 aircraft, which has a reputation for being the “terminator,” the ne plus ultra of fixed-wing gunships. Parkinson’s association with GPS derives mainly from a legendary meeting, the so-called Lonely Halls Meeting, held in an otherwise near-deserted Pentagon over the Labor Day weekend of 1973, when the outlines of the GPS architecture were discussed by a handpicked group of air force officers. Parkinson saw the importance of GPS as allowing aircraft “to drop five bombs in the same hole.” Roger Easton, by contrast, liked to think of his work as the poetic continuation of John Harrison’s timekeeping obsession of two centuries before, though linking time and space with modern technology.

  * Many of the major achievements of nineteenth-century cartography, when checked against modern GPS-derived data, have turned out to be surprisingly accurate. The thirteen-year-long Great Trigonometric Survey of India, begun by Sir George Everest in 1830, employed thousands of men working in glaciers, jungles, swamps, and hot deserts with iron chains and theodolites, and used as its baseline the fourteen-hundred-mile “Great Arc” between the Himalayas and Cape Comorin. A 2003 resurvey of the arc using laser technology and satellites showed the Victorian survey to be out by only 0.09 percent. Moreover, the vertical surveying of India was just as good as the horizontal: the team calculated the height of the Himalayas’ highest mountain—Peak XV—as 29,002 feet; subsequent surveys have indicated 29,029 feet. The peak was later to be named in English Mount Everest—though pronounced Evv-rest, unlike Sir George, whose family name was Eve-rest, the first syllable stressed. The peak stands as a potent reminder of the quality of Victorian measuring precision.

  * Or foundries, plucking from the seventeenth century a term that dealt in the crudities of ironworking to describe a twenty-first-century phenomenon wreathed in the delicacies of electronics.

  † The mutual dependency of the two companies is such that, in 2012, Intel spent four billion dollars to acquire a 15 percent stake in ASML, trusting that the Dutch firm’s researchers would use the funds to come up with ever-more-precise and economical devices for manufacturing microprocessor chips.

  * The term had not been invented at the time of Fairchild’s incorporation (with a five-hundred-dollar investment from each of the eight who left Shockley). Start-ups began to be known as such only in 1970. The founding, in a garage, of Apple Computer in 1976 is a classic example.

  * Because so many bright people marooned in their offices were doodling ideas in their notebooks, it became customary for the Fairchild company lawyers to demand that the doodled pages be witnessed and signed, to make sure that any ideas that deserved to be patented were credited to the right person. Robert Noyce, for example, witnessed and signed Hoerni’s notebook pages relating to the planar transistor. Oddly, though, Noyce’s four pages of notes written in January 1959 were never witnessed and signed, meaning that the genesis of the concept of the integrated circuit, the subject of his writing, was never formally agreed upon—anecdotally, yes; but formally and legally, no.

  * Texas Instruments also created integrated circuits, but using the bulkier mesa transistors instead of Fairchild’s planar versions. Nonetheless, the firm’s Jack Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention. Robert Noyce had died ten years before: Kilby was gracious in
his acceptance speech, allowing that Noyce, even though at a competing company, had been the integrated circuit’s co-inventor, deserving of the honor, too.

  * An emperor’s surname ceases to be used after his death, and posthumously, the name of his reign era is applied instead: so Mutsuhito becomes Meiji; Yoshihito became Taisho; Hirohito is now referred to as the Showa emperor; the current emperor, Akihito, will become the Heisei emperor when he dies or abdicates.

  * As its new specific genus name suggests—its genus was formerly known as Rhus—the tree’s leaves are poisonous, afflicting incautious forest workers with dangerous rashes, much like but much worse than those resulting from contact with America’s poison ivy, a close botanic relative.

  * Wilkins, who was variously warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was a polymath the like of which is little known today. Not only was he a practicing priest and college administrator, friend to such as Christopher Wren (St. Paul’s Cathedral) and Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s law in physics), but he had a great interest in science: he suspected there might be life on the moon, imagined the existence of new planets, devised plans for submarines and aircraft and perpetual motion machines, and, in the same book that proposed a metric system based on the pendulum, proposed the establishment of a new universal language, because of the deficiencies of Latin. Also, during his time at Wadham, he created transparent beehives so that honey could be harvested without disturbing the bees.