Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Simon Winchester

which time Wilkinson had bored no fewer than five hundred cylinders for Watt’s engines, which were being snapped up by factories and mills and mines all over the country and beyond—the Scotsman boasted that Wilkinson had “improved the art of boring cylinders so that I promise upon a seventy two inch cylinder being not farther distant from absolute truth than the thickness of an old sixpence at the worst part.” An old English sixpence was even slighter: half of a tenth of an inch, or 0.05 inches.

      Yet this is a quibble. Whether the thickness of a shilling coin or the thinness of an old sixpence, it does not really matter. The fact is that a whole new world was being created. Machines had now been made that would make other machines, and make them with accuracy, with precision. All of a sudden, there was an interest in tolerance, in the clearance by which one part was made to fit with or into another. This was something quite new, and it begins, essentially, with the delivery of that first machine on May 4, 1776. The central functioning part of the steam engine was possessed of a mechanical tolerance never before either imagined or achieved, a tolerance of 0.1 inches, and maybe even better.

      ON THE FAR side of the Atlantic Ocean, and precisely two months after the culmination of these events, on July 4, 1776, a whole new political world was to be created. The United States of America was born, with implications unimagined by all.

      It was very shortly thereafter that the new nation’s principal representative in Europe, Thomas Jefferson, heard tell of these miraculous mechanical advances and started to ponder how his own faraway country might well take advantage of developments that appeared to him to have the very greatest potential.

      Maybe, Jefferson declared, they could form the basis for a new trade well suited to his new country. Maybe, replied the engineers in response, we can do better than we have done already, and using their own arcane language of numbers, they translated their ambitions: maybe we can make and machine and manufacture metal pieces in America to a tolerance much greater than John Wilkinson’s 0.1. Maybe we can be adroit enough to reach down to 0.01. Maybe better than that—maybe to 0.001. Who could possibly know? As with the new nation, these visionary engineers wondered, so perhaps with the new machines.

      As it happened, the engineers—in England, mainly, but also, and most significantly for the next part of the story, in France—would do a great deal better than they ever supposed. The genie of accuracy was now out of the bottle. True precision was now out of the gate, and moving fast.

Chapter 2

      (TOLERANCE: 0.0001)

       Extremely Flat and Incredibly Close

      It is to the exactitude and accuracy of our machine tools that our machinery of the present time owes its smoothness of motion and certainty of action.

      —SIR WILLIAM FAIRBAIRN, BT. (1862), REPORT OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

      On the north side of London’s Piccadilly, overlooking Green Park and sandwiched between the quarters of the aged and imperturbable Cavalry Club to the west and a rather more ephemeral Peruvian-style ceviche restaurant on its eastern side, stands Number 124, these days an elegant but somewhat anonymous structure providing offices for the discreet and service apartments for the wealthy.

      Since 1784, when this far-western end of the great boulevard was still ripe for development, the address had been the home and atelier of a cabinet, engine, and lock maker named Joseph Bramah. On fair-weather days some six years after its opening, when Bramah and Company was an established and familiar small firm, modest gatherings of curious passersby would assemble outside to peer into the front bow window, puzzling at a challenge so difficult that it went unanswered for more than the sixty subsequent years.

      There was just a single object on view in the window, placed on a velvet cushion like a religious icon. It was a padlock, oval shaped, of modest size, and with a smooth and uncomplicated external appearance. On its face was written, in a small script legible only to those who pressed their faces close to the window glass, the following words: THE ARTIST WHO CAN MAKE AN INSTRUMENT THAT WILL PICK OR OPEN THIS LOCK SHALL RECEIVE 200 GUINEAS THE MOMENT IT IS PRODUCED.

      

       Joseph Bramah, locksmith extraordinaire, also invented the fountain pen, a device for keeping beer cool and under pressure in a pub basement, and a machine for counting banknotes.

      The designer of this boastfully unbreakable lock was the firm’s principal, Joseph Bramah. Its maker, however, was not Bramah but a then-nineteen-year-old former blacksmith’s apprentice named Henry Maudslay, whom Bramah had taken on the previous year, entirely because of Maudslay’s reputation for having a formidable skill in delicate machining.

      It would not be until 1851 that the Bramah lock was successfully—although, as we shall see in a later chapter, controversially—picked and the very handsome pledge^* redeemed. And in the years leading up to this event (which only their descendants would survive to witness), these two men, Bramah and Maudslay, proved themselves to be engineers supreme. They invented all manner of intriguing new devices, and they effectively and independently wrote the rule books for the precise world that was beginning to emerge as a consequence of (or, at least, in the wake of) John Wilkinson’s achievements with his cylinder-boring machine at Bersham. Some of the two men’s inventions have faded away into history; some others, however, have survived as the foundations on which much of today’s most sophisticated engineering achievements would eventually be built.

      Though Maudslay remains today the better-known figure, with a legacy recognized by most engineers, Bramah was at the time perhaps the more showily ingenious of the pair. His first invention was dreamed up while he lay in bed after a fall, and must rank as the least romantic: for a London population that sorely needed an improvement in public hygiene, he built water closets, and he patented his ideas for a system of flaps and a float and valves and pipes that made the device both self-cleansing (flushing, indeed, for the first time) and free from the usual risk of freezing in winter that created unpleasant results for all. He made a small fortune from this creation, selling six thousand in the first twenty years of production, and a Bramah WC was still the centerpiece of the civilized English middle-class bathroom right up until Victoria’s Jubilee, a hundred years later.

      Bramah’s interest in locks, which required far more intricacy and precise workmanship than a toilet, of course, seems to have started when he was elected in 1783 a member of the newly formed (and still there, in its original home) Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.^* What is now simply the Royal Society of Arts, the RSA, back in the eighteenth century had six divisions: Agriculture, Chemistry, Colonies and Trade, Manufactures, Mechanicks (spelled thus), and most quaintly, the Polite Arts. Bramah not unnaturally opted to attend most of the Mechanicks meetings and, soon after joining, rocketed to prominence by the simple act of picking a lock. Not so simply, actually: in September 1783, a Mr. Marshall had submitted for consideration what he declared was a formidably unpickable lock, and had a local expert named Truelove worry away at it with a quiverful of special tools for an hour and a half, before accepting defeat. Then, from the back of the audience stepped Joseph Bramah, who quickly fashioned a pair of instruments and opened the lock in fifteen minutes flat. A buzz of excitement went around the room: they were clearly in the presence of a most Mechanickal man.

      Locks were a British obsession at the time. The social and legislative changes that were sweeping the country in the late eighteenth century were having the undesirable effect of dividing society quite brutally: while the landed aristocracy had for centuries protected itself in grand houses behind walls and parks and ha-has, and with resident staff to keep mischief at bay, the enriched beneficiaries of the new business climate were much more accessible to the persistent poor. They and their possessions were generally both visible and, especially in the fast-growing cities, nearby; they tended to live in houses and on streets within earshot and slingshot