Exactly. Simon Winchester

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

      Copyright © Simon Winchester 2018

      Cover images © Getty Images

      Simon Winchester asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      Much of the material here relating to the Tohoku Tsunami of March 2011 is taken with permission from an essay by Simon Winchester in the New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017.

      Image of space on title page by Yuriy Mazur/Shutterstock, Inc.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008241766

      Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008241797

      Version: 2019-11-12

       Dedication

       For Setsuko

       And in loving memory of my father,

       Bernard Austin William Winchester, 1921–2011,

       a most meticulous man

       Epigraph

      These brief passages from works by the writer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) might usefully be borne in mind while reading the pages that follow.

       The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

      —THE CULTURE OF CITIES (1938)

       We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.

      —VALUES FOR SURVIVAL (1946)

       Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

      —MY WORKS AND DAYS (1979)

      Contents

       Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Prologue

Chapter 1: Stars, Seconds, Cylinders, and Steam

Chapter 2: Extremely Flat and Incredibly Close

       Chapter 3: A Gun in Every Home, a Clock in Every Cabin

       Chapter 4: On the Verge of a More Perfect World

       Chapter 5: The Irresistible Lure of the Highway

       Chapter 6: Precision and Peril, Six Miles High

       Chapter 7: Through a Glass, Distinctly

       Chapter 8: Where Am I, and What Is the Time?

       Chapter 9: Squeezing Beyond Boundaries

       Chapter 10: On the Necessity for Equipoise

      Afterword: The Measure of All Things

       Acknowledgments

       A Glossary of Possibly Unfamiliar Terms

       Bibliography

       Index

       About the Author

       Also by Simon Winchester

       About the Publisher

       List of Illustrations

       Unless otherwise noted, all images are in the public domain.

Difference between Accuracy and Precision

John Wilkinson

Boulton and Watt steam engine

Joseph Bramah

Henry Maudslay

Maudslay’s “Lord Chancellor” bench micrometer (courtesy of the Science Museum Group Collection)

      Flintlock on a rifle

      Thomas Jefferson

      Springfield Armory “organ of muskets”

      Joseph Whitworth

      Crystal Palace

      Whitworth screws (courtesy of Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com)

      “Unpickable” Bramah lock

      Henry Royce

      Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost (courtesy of Malcolm Asquith)

       Ford Model T

       Ford Model T (exploded)

      Henry Ford

      Ford assembly line

      Box of gauge blocks

      Qantas Flight 32 (2010 incident) (courtesy of Australian Transport Safety Bureau)

      Frank Whittle (courtesy