The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester

  The Men Who United the States

  When the Earth Shakes

  When the Sky Breaks

  Oxford

  Copyright

  THE PERFECTIONISTS. Copyright © 2018 by Simon Winchester. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Much of the material here relating to the Tohoku Tsunami of March 2011 is taken with permission from an essay by Simon Winchester in the New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017.

  FIRST EDITION

  Image of space on title page by Yuriy Mazur/Shutterstock, Inc.

  Digital Edition MAY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-265257-7

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-265255-3

  Version 04062018

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  * The few hundred members of this somewhat exclusive calling specialize in making glass instruments of great delicacy and complexity for use largely in chemical laboratories. They have a journal, Fusion; they hold conventions; and they have a hero, a Japanese American immigrant named Mitsugi Ohno, who, until his death in 1999 at age seventy-three, worked mainly for Kansas State University and whose collection of enormous and detailed glass models of ships and iconic American buildings remains on the campus in the town of Manhattan. Ohno is most famous for having found a way to blow a Klein bottle, a recurving vessel that, like a three-dimensional version of a Möbius strip, has only a single surface.

  * Although T. S. Eliot did employ it in his 1917 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”: “Whispering lunar incantations / Dissolve the floors of memory / And all its clear relations, / Its divisions and precisions . . .”

  * Crucial to the making of almost anything is the matter of its measurement. In English, this usually involves the use of the near-invisible adverb how, with its interrogative determination of to what extent and to what degree something might be. How long is it, how massive, how straight an edge, how curved a surface, how hard, how close the fit? The Ancient Egyptians were the first to define such terms, with the cubit, the length of a pharaoh’s forearm, generally agreed to be the grand old man of measurement. Thereafter other human attributes were derived by other civilizations—the length of a thumb or a foot, the distance covered by a thousand paces, the span of a day’s journeying—to form the basis of measuring scales, with the inch or the pound or the grave or the catty usually fixed; while others—the Chinese unit of distance, the li, for example—were set to vary, depending on whether the road to be traveled was flat or uphill. Then came the French and their deliciously neat and decimally based système métrique, and in short order thereafter today’s sedulously contrived and internationally agreed International System of Units, which is better known as SI, and which defines (and has been formally adopted by all, except for Burma, Liberia, and the United States) the seven fundamental units of length, mass, time, electric current, temperature, amount of substance, and light intensity—otherwise known as the meter, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the kelvin, the mole, and the candela. In order not to stall the narrative pace of this history, I have placed a more detailed tour of measurement’s multitudinous mysteries at the end of this book, as an afterword.

  * Since its first formal definition, in 1916, as “the permissible margins of error” in machine workmanship. An 1868 British report on international coinage presaged this particular usage when it noted that as far as gold coins were concerned, “the margin for error in coining . . . known as the remedy or tolerance . . . amounts to 15 grains for the fineness, plus or minus 1/16 of a carat.”

  * Precision-made shoe lasts, created on a machine designed by one Thomas Blanchard in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1817, are a part of the American precision story, too, as will be explained in chapter 3.

  * Both Classical and the later Hellenistic Greek astronomers knew of five other planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Although the Greek names for them were different from our own—in order, they were Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Cronos—the word planet is Greek, and means “wanderer,” because, to early eyes, the bodies wandered across the sky in a different manner from the stars behind them.

  * Once out of sight of land, ships’ crews have no means of knowing accurately their exact position. To determine their latitude, the distance north or south of the equator, is easy, requiring only the measurement of the altitude of the sun at midday or (in the Northern Hemisphere) the pole star at night. But determining longitude, the distance east or west around the world from the ship’s home port, is much more difficult. Longitude meridians mark the time difference between places, as the planet turns through 360 degrees every twenty-four hours, so each hour is equivalent to a drawn meridian of 15 degrees of longitude. But the time difference, and thus the longitude, can be worked out only if the time back at the home port is known by the ship at sea (its own local time being comparatively easy to determine from the sun and the stars). And for any timekeeper (on board a ship rolling violently in storms, passing through areas of fierce heat and deep cold, and with the clock never once being allowed to stop) to maintain an accurate record of this time was, to early eighteenth-century navigators, deemed well-nigh impossible.

  * Oxford lore has it that this violin, known as Le Messie (“the Messiah”), remained unplayed and virginal until a man from an American southern state arrived and insisted that he be allowed to play it, and wept bitterly when refused. The keeper relented and locked the man in the room for fifteen minutes, during which music of an ethereal beauty such as no one in the museum had ever heard before, wafted through the doors, to the delight of all.

  * The man who restored (and assigned the initials to) the Harrisons, Rupert Gould, was something of a character. A six-foot-four-inch pipe-smoking former Royal Navy officer known as a congenial children’s broadcaster, a scholar of esoteric subjects, a sometime Wimbledon centre court tennis umpire, and an expert on the Loch Ness Monster, he was also famous for violent, drunken outbursts, a number of savage mental breakdowns, and curious sexual predilections, all of which culminated in a spectacular 1927 divorce action that held the nation enthralled. He wrote and illustrated a classic work on seagoing clocks in 1923 (still in print) and soon thereafter managed to persuade the Royal Observatory to release the Harrison clocks, which were decaying in a seldom-visited basement. He got H1 to work again after 165 years. The restoration effort c
onsumed 10 years of his life, a life memorialized in a 2000 TV drama, Longitude, in which he was played by the actor Jeremy Irons.

  * With an unscheduled stop in Madeira to replace the crew’s tainted beer supply.

  * During Wilkinson’s lifetime, the newly created Great Britain was very much in a fighting mood, indulging in such conflicts as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, with Spain; the War of the Austrian Succession, against France; the Seven Years’ War, with France and Spain together; the American Revolutionary War; the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War; and then, once Ireland joined England and Scotland to make the United Kingdom, the Napoleonic Wars. Wilkinson cannons were used in almost all the major battles.

  * Worth about the price of a small Mercedes today.

  * Among those who recognized the young Yorkshireman’s talent was a surgeon named John Sheldon, who was an expert in embalming, claimed to have been the first Londoner to fly in a balloon, and traveled to Greenland to experiment on a new technique of catching whales by spearing them with harpoons tipped with the poison curare.

  * He rather hedged his bets, though, by also inventing a device that could cut multiple pen nibs from a single goose feather quill. If his newfangled metal-nibbed pen with its squeezable rubber ink reservoir didn’t catch on, he could always fall back on a mass-produced version of the traditional writing instrument.

  * Both Bentham and Brunel had close relatives much more famous than they. Samuel’s older brother was Jeremy Bentham, the distinguished philosopher, jurist, and prison reformer whose fully clothed remains, his auto-icon, are still seated in a chair in University College London. Brunel’s son was the memorably named Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of so much that remains spectacularly Victorian in today’s Britain, and a popular hero still, ranked by the adoring British public along with Nelson, Churchill, and Newton.

  * A block has four basic parts: the wooden shell, the hardwood sheave, a pin for holding the sheave in the shell, and a bushing (the “coak” mentioned in the patent) to minimize wear on the pin. All four would be run hard, of course, every time a rope was passed through the sheave for one of the many reasons a sailor might employ a block. Making the shell alone required seven separate procedures: wooden slices had to be cut from an elm log; the slices had to be cut into rectangles; a hole had to be bored for the pin; mortices had to be cut to allow the sheaves to be inserted; the block’s corners had to be cut off and the edges chamfered; the block faces had to be curved and shaped and smoothed; and finally, grooves had to be scored into the block faces to allow ropes to be sited to hold each block secure. Then again, six very different actions needed to be performed on the wooden sheaves, four more were needed for the pins, and two further still for making the bushing. And the entire confection had to be assembled, smoothed off, and sent to storage.

  * Maudslay revered Napoleon as his “ideal hero,” and collected all and any piece of art that featured him. According to James Nasmyth, an engineer colleague of great note himself, Maudslay especially admired the emperor because of the great public works (roads, canals, monumental buildings, banks, the French stock exchange) he instigated.

  * It was pure coincidence that the prime minister whose government introduced this act, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated some eight weeks after the law was enacted. And coincidence, too, that King George III, in whose name the law was passed, was himself declared mad and temporarily removed from office. That precision-made machines were abroad at the time, and that some workers were made redundant as a consequence of their introduction, and that rioting briefly erupted across the kingdom at around the same time, made the beginning of the nineteenth century a time of unusual turmoil, but not turmoil that can be blamed on the new technologies. The prime minister’s assassin, for example, had a personal grudge based on a debt incurred in Russia. He was hanged for his crime, Perceval being the only British premier ever to have been assassinated.

  † This figurative use of the word steam would not enter the language until ten years later, when the twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Disraeli included it in his first novel, Vivian Grey. That it was employed in literary inventions of the day is a reminder of its literal use in the still-youthful Industrial Revolution, of which Disraeli can fairly be said to have been a beneficiary, though he turned to writing to earn money, which he lost, disastrously, by investing in South American railways.

  * Anglo-French rivalry has been a constant for centuries, and extends into the world of war fighting just as it does into cuisine and car manufacture. Soldierly distaste for Gribeauval’s purloining of John Wilkinson’s work is matched by French irritation that the word shrapnel derives from Sir Henry Shrapnel’s invention of this most deadly of weapons, a shell that hurls lethal metal debris around upon detonation. The British Sir Henry didn’t invent it; a Frenchman named Bernard Forest de Bélidor did, assisted in the field by the aforementioned M. de Gribeauval.

  * New England had more than its fair share of gunsmiths, principally because it was the first part of the continent to be thickly settled by colonists, and because there was ample water, and waterfalls, to provide power for such machinery as was needed to work primitive lathes and turning devices. Although modeled on European guns, New England weapons were often made with longer-than-usual barrels, a feature that derived from the colonists’ trade with the local Indians. The main trade goods the Indians could offer were beaver skins, and it became customary for traders to exchange a musket for a pile of beaver pelts as tall as the gun was long. (One of the oldest private gun-making firms that made such weapons was that of the Robbins and Lawrence Company in Windsor, Vermont, its buildings finely preserved and lately turned into the American Precision Museum.)

  * Improvements made a long while ago can seem mundane and trivial with the benefit of contemporary sophistication, but were critical in the evolution of precision engineering. John Hall’s improvements are very much of this kind: he tinkered with the means of ejecting a workpiece from the milling machine, and so prevented the die’s temperature from changing dramatically during the process and thus risk losing its temper. He also designed so-called fixtures, the devices that hold a workpiece absolutely secure during milling, further ensuring that his milling cuts were made with all needed precision, an essential for guaranteeing the fit of the pieces.

  * Being able to connect the time in my various household clocks to the atomic clock that provides the official time for the United States of America introduces the concept of traceability, a cornerstone of precision unknown to the clockmakers and gun makers and the pulley block makers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but entirely essential today. Much is to be made of traceability in the world’s metrology institutes, described in the afterword.

  * It may be recalled that it was at the same society that Joseph Bramah, sixty years before, first encountered the complexities of locksmithing and made what he thought was an unpickable lock. It was finally picked at the 1851 exhibition.

  † The origin of the exhibition idea properly belongs to Henry “Old King” Cole, a British civil servant of remarkable ability and breadth of knowledge who, among other achievements, designed the world’s first postage stamp, the “Penny Black.” Cole also began the tradition of sending Christmas cards each December (and printed his own), and under the pseudonym Felix Summerly, he won an award at the 1845 Society of Arts Exhibition for the design of a ceramic tea service. He knew Prince Albert well, and persuaded him to defy the insufferable court traditionalists by throwing his weight and influence behind this immensely ambitious project of 1851.

  * Lexicography would amply confirm this: for though the exact meaning of the English phrase “the sharp edge of a blade that performs the cutting” had been in use since 1825, the figurative meaning, in which cutting edge is “the latest or most advanced stage in the development of something,” first appeared in print in an American journal called The National Era, in July of the very same year as the Great Exhibition, 1851.

  * Might there have been something in t
he water? The Cambridgeshire village of Royce’s birth, Alwalton, was also where Frank Perkins, inventor of a much-revered brand of diesel engines, was born twenty-six years later. Yet only Henry Royce won the memorial plaque in the local church.

  * Johnson always considered himself “the hyphen” in “Rolls-Royce,” that he was essentially the godfather of the Silver Ghost, and insisted that the firm make only one model and make it as perfectly as possible. Considering he was the man who gave the car its name, the founder of the Royal Automobile Club, and, one might argue, the first to make motorcars popular in the United Kingdom, suggests that his importance was far greater than as a mere bridging symbol.

  * Many years later, Ford had his staff searching for a slide valve he had once fashioned for this engine, and which he remembered as being numbered 345. They eventually discovered it broken and abandoned in a Pennsylvania field. To help celebrate his sixtieth birthday, Ford had it repaired and refurbished, fired it up, and used it to thresh corn once again. As to whether “345” was his Rosebud, or whether he simply wanted to remind himself of the design of the slide valve he had made for it, Ford corporate history is unclear.