The Perfectionists

It starts with a hole. John Wilkinson works out how to bore a true cylinder through solid iron, and James Watt's steam engine — which until then let its steam slip past a piston that did not quite fit — becomes a machine that works. Winchester then arranges the whole book by tolerance, each chapter concerned with a tighter fit than the one before, from a piston in a cylinder to instruments reading a fraction of a wavelength.

The idea that makes it worth reading is the difference between precision and accuracy. The Hubble Space Telescope's mirror was ground and polished to an extraordinary standard, and to the wrong shape: precisely wrong, a flawless answer to a mistaken question. Around that sit guns and clocks and interchangeable parts, cars, aero engines, camera glass, satellite navigation and the detection of gravitational waves, each told as a set piece with the people left in it.

Winchester writes as a guide rather than an engineer, and the guiding is the pleasure. The reservation is that the set pieces are better than the argument connecting them — the chapters are ordered by tolerance rather than driven by a thesis, and several would work in any order. The last one turns against the book, arguing for craft and imperfection and using Japan as a country that holds both at once, which is the most interesting move Winchester makes and the least supported by the three hundred pages in front of it.