The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, Simon Winchester, c. 2018.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, Simon Winchester, c. 2018.

June 5, 2025: reading this book for the second time, I had hoped the book would discuss semiconductors and transistors. Not to be.

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Quotes From The Book

Richard Feynman, p. 213: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

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Notes On The Book

Prologue: a very, very long essay on precision and accuracy.

Chapter 1: (Tolerance: 0.1) Stars, Seconds, Cylinders, and Steam

Chapter 2: (Tolerance: 0.0001) Extremely Flat and Incredibly Close

• 1784
• Joseph Bramah, the padlock
• Henry Maudslay, 1771 - 1831: English machine tool innovator; tool and die maker; inventor
• not until 1851 was his padlock controversially picked

Chapter 3: (Tolerance: 0.000 01) A Gun In Every Home, A Clock In Every Cabin

• long, long chapter on guns
• The "War of 1812" was a conflict between the United States and the United Kingdom that lasted from 1812 to 1815. It is sometimes referred to as the "Second War of Independence". The war was fought on land and at sea, with battles occurring in North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The war ended with the Treaty of Ghent, which restored the pre-war borders and declared an end to the conflict.
• the flintlock
• Thomas Jefferson
• 1784: arrives in France; worked alongside Benjamin Franklin and John Adams; both of these left Paris that July, leaving Jefferson alone in Paris. Franklin back to Washington; John Adams to London.
  
• The Dark Side
•  
  

Chapter 4: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 1) On The Verge of a More Perfect World

• Summer of 1851: The International Exhibition
• Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Joseph Whitworth (1803 - 1887)
  

• Famous people of the time attended the Great Exhibition, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Michael Faraday (who assisted with the planning and judging of exhibits), Samuel Colt, members of the Orléanist royal family and the writers Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray. The future Arts and Crafts proponent William Morris, then a teenager, later said he refused to attend the Exhibition on the grounds of taste. Exhibits showcased include the first public flush toilets invented by George Jennings.
• Joseph Whitworth;  in 1841, he devised the British Standard Whitworth system, which created an accepted standard for screw threads. Whitworth also created the Whitworth rifle, often called the "sharpshooter" because of its accuracy, which is considered one of the earliest examples of a sniper rifle, used by some Confederate forces during the American Civil war.

Chapter 5: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 000 1) The Irresistible Lure of the Highway

• Henry Royce: made the cars
• Charles Rolls: marketer, sold the cars; flamboyant
• Henry Ford

Chapter 6: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 000 001) Precision and Peril, Six Miles High

The jet engine, the turbine.

Chapter 7: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 000 000 1) Through a Glass, Distinctly

Lenses; the Hubble telescope.

Chapter 8: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 000 000 000 01) Where Am I, And What Is The Time?

GPS.

In one paragraph I understood how satellites and GPS works.  

• Monday, October 7, 1957.
• Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory.
• William Guier (in memorium and wiki) and George Weiffenbach (in memorium and wiki).
  
• Page 259 and following:
• goofing around they realized they could track Russia's satellite Sputnik, using existing technology ["bat" (the flying mammal) technology); Doppler effect of radio frequencies, etc].
• to do the calculations: a brand-new Remington Univac; the first Remington Univac was delivered March 31, 1951; to the census bureau
• chairman of the APL, Frank McClure called the two into his office and asked how they did it and wheter if they could determine the numerical reciprocal, i.e., their location on earth;the US Navy paid for much of the APL work in Baltimore;determined that with "a good number of satellites, the GPS location could be determined perhaps within half a mile

More: 

• USN -- Polaris-armed nuclear submarines needed this technology
• within six years: a flotilla of US Navy Transit satellites deployed
• using Doppler effect, the technology was not good enough for what the US Navy needed
• enter the son of a Vermont country doctor: Roger Easton, 1973
• Roger Easton came up with this idea explained in modern terms: two clocks one in Detroit and one London, both clocks linked by video stream, on Skype, FaceTime or WhatsApp -- p. 265
• Roger Easton working at the then-named Space Applications Branch in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas and who created the infamous "space fence," a vast array of detectors claimed to be able to map any satellite passing over US territory.
• tested his system using a hydrogen maser, p. 266, one of which was placed on his friend's convertible and his friend told to drive as fast and as far as he could on yet-to-be-finished Texas Route 295.
• however, the Air Force begs to differ, saying that an air force combat-hardened officer names Bradford Parkinson fathered the system -- page. 267.
• wiki the "GPS Mafia" -- Parkinson's book: The Origins of GPS, Stephen T Powers and Brad Parkinson, c. ??
• US Air Force began construction of the satellite system that would be at the core of what would be called the Navstar Global Positioning System -- later simplified to GPS -- p. 268.

GPS satellites:

Block 1: 1978 - 1985

• Initially, top secret, restricted to military, Ronald Reagan completely declassified GPS after Korean Air Lines Fight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983.
• Since then:
• Soviet Union / Russian system called GONASS.
• The pan-European system: Galileo
• Chinese system: Beidou
• Military put in an error so civilians could not get exact location, but Bill Clinton took away that restriction in 2000.
• The entire system is now run from the tightly guarded Schriever AFB, near Colorado Springs, CO, close to the famously immense bunker under Cheyene Mountain where the US is supposedly protected from nuclear attack.Second Space Operations Squadron (2 SOPS).

 Link here:

The squadron performs the command and control mission for the 37-satellite Global Positioning System constellation, providing precise, three-dimensional position, navigation, and timing information to military and civilian users around the globe by operating NAVSTAR GPS, the military’s largest, and the world’s most widely-used, satellite constellation. GPS is the world's premiere space-based PNT system, capable of providing information simultaneously to an unlimited number of properly equipped users. Continuous GPS availability and unprecedented accuracy has resulted in widespread integration of the technology; numerous military, commercial and international users have embraced GPS. The squadron operates the largest Department of Defense spacecraft constellation via the Master Control Station and worldwide network of monitor stations and ground antennas. The monitor stations track the satellites' navigation signals and relay the information to the MCS. The MCS continuously processes this information, determines each satellite's precise location in space and updates the satellites' navigation messages through the ground antennas. The MCS also houses a customer interface: the GPS Warfighter Collaboration Cell is a 24/7 user-focused center supporting a wide variety of military, civilian and commercial users and applications.

So, who invented GPS, the US Navy or the USAF? Again, it takes a bit of reading and one still doesn't get the answer clearly. So I went to ChatGPT with this prompt, 

"who should get credit for "inventing" GPS? The US Navy (Roger Easton) or the USAF (Bradford Parkinson)?"

and got this answer: 

• Official recognition: In 2004, both Easton and Parkinson were awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize — effectively the “Nobel of Engineering” — for inventing GPS, along with Ivan Getting (Aerospace Corp.) and Gladys West (AFRL mathematician who worked on geodetic models).
• If you’re asking who invented GPS, the correct answer is: Roger Easton provided the visionary concept Bradford Parkinson made it work.

Chapter 9: (Tolerance: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01) Squeezing Beyond Boundaries.

A machine that makes machines. ASML.

Chapter 10: On the Necessity for Equipoise

Equipoise: a state of balance or equilibrium.

A word that piques my interest, and, as such, is similar to ennui. 

Along with penultimate.

Craft.

Afterword: The Measure of All Things

Bibliograpy

Glossary

Index