Precision Engineering is Everywhere

Simon Winchester’s book, Exactly, is an awesome walk-through the role of precision engineering in shaping the modern world. I assumed the book was about the world of electronics and miniaturization, but no, the story starts much, much earlier. And covers a lot many topics.

During the American fight for independence from the British, for example, consider this problem:

“Once a gun had been physically damaged in some way, the entire weapon had to be returned to its maker or to a competent gunsmith to be remade or else replaced. It was not possible… simply to identify the broken part and replace it with another from the armory stores.”

Whyever not?

“No one had ever thought to make a gun from component parts that were each so precisely constructed that they were identical with one another.”

Component parts that are identical with one another. More than a century later, that is exactly what Henry Ford needed as a pre-requisite for his dream of mass producing cars. Identical parts would allow cars to be assembled by taking any instance of each type, “none subject to a worker’s whim or a bout of Friday laziness.”

Today, we take assembly lines for granted. And we forget that every assembly line “requires precision as an absolute essential”. Sure, some things have changed, even flipped, but the need for finer precision only increases:

“Where precision once employed small machines to construct big things (e.g. steam engines), it now employs big machines to create… tiny ones (e.g. the famous Integrated Circuit).”

The role of precision in diverse fields through the ages, from clocks to cylinders used in steam engines to guns to cars to jet engines to lenses (think Hubble Telescope, not just the camera in your phone) to GPS (the how-it-works part, not how you use it!) to miniaturized electronics, is simply mind-blowing.