https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Created-Modern/dp/0062652567
if you want to read the NY Times review: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/books/review/simon-winchester-perfectionists.html
But I recommend Jay Leno's review: https://www.hagerty.com/media/magazine-features/leno-precision-machining-built-the-world-as-we-know-it/
If you’ve ever wondered how we went from chiseling rocks to making microchip transistors that are 13.5-billionths of a meter wide, then author Simon Winchester has a tale for you.
As you might imagine, his story starts with the people who made the first clocks, padlocks, and guns, though it goes back even further than that. In 1901, some sponge divers near the Greek island Antikythera found a shipwreck containing what turned out to be a mechanical computer more than 2000 years old.
The Antikythera mechanism has at least 30 bronze gears in it for calculating the movement of the sun and moon and for predicting eclipses. At least, it did before it was dumped in the ocean for two millennia. The discovery of a 2000-year-old computer is a pretty good opener for a story; I couldn’t stop reading after that.
Winchester takes you through the development of precision-bore cannons in the 1700s by a guy named John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson, followed by the adaptation of that technology by James Watt to steam engines. The invention of the lathe, followed by the invention of the slide rest on the lathe for fixing a cutting tool precisely in place, is what opened the door to the modern era, Winchester writes.
As is often the case, war was a great mother of invention. In the early 1800s, Britain was constantly scrapping with France, and the British navy needed pulley blocks in huge numbers. One ship could have 1400 pulley blocks in its rigging, but the craftsmen couldn’t keep up. It took him six years, but a machinist named Henry Maudslay built the first machine assembly line, and with it, Britain ruled the seas.
The fascinating thing is that there was a real backlash, because every town had craftsmen who made things by hand. Gunsmiths took weeks to make a gun, then wiped their hands and made another. The idea that unskilled people working machines could produce precision products was insulting to the craft guilds.
