The Perfectionists book: perfectly precise and accurate must-read

On the 12th day of our 12 days of tools…

It’s a book about tools that tells the tales of the tools that make the tools.

The Perfectionists book tells the tales of the tools that make the tools.

The prolific and so-interesting-he-makes-my-socks-crumple-up-in-the-bottom-of-my-boots author, Simon Winchester, just soars in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

Yes, it’s about machines, but it’s not technical in an unrelatable sense.

It’s about industry, too, but it is not a business book.

It’s not even really about how machines work, even though he gets under the hood in wonderful detail. Rather, it centers on the shift in humanity’s ability to create things in a new way, starting mainly in the Industrial Revolution that shifted us into the modern world. Literally everything we interact with today is the result of precision, its definition is at the beginning of the book.

Precision: It is not accuracy. Precision is the ability to repeatably make the same exact thing, over and over.

The Perfectionists book is about the tools that makes the tools. So, for example, sailors of old needed a clock to figure out longitude. And they needed to know what time it was in Greenwich, England when they were in the Azores. Well, in the 1500s, someone figured out how to make a clock. But it took a year to make one and the second one wasn’t the same–exactly–as the first one. Accuracy is how closely the second clock resembled the first.

Winchester goes on to point up that precision isn’t really the product or item made either. Rather it’s the tools that make the tools that is precision. The early stories about cannons and pulleys are gripping.

The chapter on why a certain plane almost crashed–that I read on a plane!–because one of the the thousands of holes drilled in the engine’s turbine was a little off made me want to cry. It’s just awesome to read about jet engines that burn so hot that unless they are properly air-cooled by thousands of gotta-be-dead-nuts-on-the-money-hypercomplex-holes they’d liquefy. I give The Perfectionists book my highest rating because there’s nothing else like it.

Mark

A licensed contractor, tool expert, wood and outdoor enthusiast, and elite Spartan Race competitor, he writes about home improvement and tools for national magazines and websites, and teaches hands-on clinics for other remodeling professionals. Check out his book, The Carpenter's Notebook.

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