Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
The popular image of the industrial revolution is of titanic forces unleashed by steam, of dark satanic mills and choking clouds of smog. But the machines did not spring into being, fully formed. Behind our modern age lies an obsession with precision, with exactitude in measurement and cutting that a medieval master craftsman would find extremely odd, and which we find extremely normal. Winchester chronicles 250 years of precision engineering, starting with John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, a cannon ma...
5 Stars for The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World (audiobook) by Simon Winchester read by the author. This is a must read for anybody that’s interested in engineering. Simon Winchester does an amazing job bringing this topic to life. I also really enjoy his narration.
Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise. But we will certainly give it our best shot. “Where did we come from?” is not only a religious question. It is also question of history. Simon Winchester is always a most welcome Virgil escorting us through the circles of historical knowledge, illuminating the unknown, or only slightly suspected, with the light of his explorer’s torch. We have trailed him on some of his many prior journeys
Simon Winchester and I usually make a good pair. I like his topics and his narrative style. Truth be told, if I had real writer’s talent, I would love to have the freedom to roam the world writing about the fascinating things that our world contains and that people do. To that extent, I envy the author.Here, Winchester is discussing a matter dear to his heart, “how precision engineers created the modern world.” This is so because Winchester’s own father was one of this group.Words that are key t...
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error. Fine quotation from Bertold Brecht to set the mood for a popular science tome. I really came with high hopes to this history of precision work, but I walked out with (mostly) empty hands. I would have been more informed on the subject by browsing wikipedia for a couple of hours than by reading this rambling and often off-topic attempt by Simon Winchester. This is my first read from his output, b
Another polished performance by the old pro. If you like stories of heroic engineers (and some not so heroic), and how our technical civilization has developed since the early Days of Steam, you will have fun with this. He has something fresh to say about even topics I know pretty well, and I learned a lot about the early days of satellite navigation, and how the Age of Silicon is likely to reach its limits soon. It's a pretty quick and easy read; he lost me only with a superfluous trip to Japan...
Despite the excellent premise and all the fascinating stories, which I enjoyed very much, I can't help feeling a little disappointed with this book. Winchester cranks out his books in a way that feels a bit rushed to me. The Man Who Loved China and The Map that Changed the World both spent a lot of time saying how wonderful/ incredible/revolutionary the respective subjects of the books were but little time explaining WHY, perhaps because that would have taken a lot more work. I get the feeling t...
Engineers are probably some of the least appreciated people in the UK and yet if you think about it everything is dependent on them. If there were no engineers you would not have items like your phone, your car, bicycles, kitchen gadgets, computers, electricity and even the very infrastructure that means that you can live life in the modern way. Things are much better built now too, compared to even twenty years ago, that extra precision we have got makes for better quality products. But, what i...
All this precision and then... there's me with: "lefty loosey righty tighty".
This just wasn't for me. I've accepted the fact that I'm not interested in everything.
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester is a very highly recommended examination of the history, science, and work of precision engineers along with biographical sketches of some of the influential engineers that helped develop technology to take us from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age.The early attention to precision, accuracy, and degrees of tolerance ushered in the the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, and the Technological Re...
This book was surprisingly good, to me. To someone who is non-technical and not interested in the technical history of precision machinery, it might be mostly boring. There is probably something here for everyone, though, such as the story of the Hubble telescope and its rescue from total failure after being launched into orbit. The story starts out with the author recounting an experience when he was young, and his father brought out a heavy oak box with a brass tag on the outside. Inside were
The Perfectionists is a rare book about unheralded engineers, who have truly built the modern society around us. Like in the popular TV series Big Bang Theory, theoreticians like Sheldon Cooper get the limelight while directly and indirectly undermining the contributions of every Wolowitz. We often forget that the armchair thinkers genuinely struggle if they have to change even a lightbulb. Real-life innovations require different skills that have had as much impact on humanity as the ideas of th...