I found this to be a somewhat frustrating book, as described below. If there were more popular books on civil or structural engineering I might not have even read it, but being starved I went for the mechanical engineering text. Winchester is one of the great explainers, who writes books taking complicated and little-known topics and making them accessible to a general audience. He’s quite good at it, and I’ve read several of his other books.
There are two ways to approach The Perfectionists and I’m honestly not sure which he intended. First, it can be seen as a series of essays on the theme of precision. The first six chapters are on various topics relating to traditional machine-style narratives that are reasonably common in the history of technology. The most famous, which Winchester manages a fresh take on, is the story of the “American System” of interchangeable parts, but he is at his best talking about some fairly obscure moments in machine-tool development. He rightly points out that nearly all modern ordinary objects (and I’ll come back to the “nearly” later on) are much more precisely made than their predecessors. Then the following chapters are on the Hubble Space Telescope, GPS, integrated-circuit chip fabrication, and quartz watches. All of the chapters but the last have a heading discussing the approximate level of tolerance discussed in the chapter, and they are arranged so that the tolerance keeps getting smaller. Each chapter, taken on its own as an essay, is enjoyable; the last chapter discusses the possibility that people may derive more pleasure from things that are less precise, that are imperfect on a human scale.
The other approach is to approach this as a unified book, in which case it’s horribly flawed. There is no obvious link other than “precision” between gun-lock manufacturing in the nineteenth century and chip fabs today and pretending that there is mars the individual arguments of each chapter. As a single story, the plot jumps around and there is almost no continuity from one section to the next. As a single story, the brief discussion of people’s reaction against precision is too short and oddly placed; as a single essay, that chapter reads just fine. When I was in high school, I first watched and then read Connections by James Burke. It greatly influenced me towards the history of technology. I’m not sure if Winchester need more room – as Burke had – or if he needed to tighten his focus. In any case, this book is enjoyable and informative in its parts but feels like a missed opportunity as a whole.
Finally, there is a certain irony in a structural engineer discussing precision. The precision that is the core of the first chapter is 0.1 inches. The vast majority of allowable tolerances in modern structure are larger: most of the tolerances for steel construction in the U.S. code are 1/8 inch (0.125 inches) or greater; the length of most beams is allowed to vary over or under by as much as 1/2 inch. In other words, current-day structural engineering is imprecise by the standards of eighteenth-century mechanical engineering. So of all the engineered objects in the modern world, the least precise are the ones I deal with.
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