Revered author Simon Winchester joins the program. Winchester is a many time NY Times bestselling author whose books include The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and others - and he joins us to talk about his new book which is The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Winchester traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision.
The rise of manufacturing, our guest says, could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, then he moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.