Apr 25, 2018
Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with author Simon Winchester (@simonwwriter) about his latest book, The Perfectionists.
In this, he writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs Boson.
Precision, Winchester says, is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives – a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps – all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world?
Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision’s pioneers. this book takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America.
Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and
broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career
at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous
significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate
Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed
to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his
articles appear in several travel publications
including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian
Magazine, and National
Geographic.
In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first
as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was
later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent.
Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several
events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and
the Belfast Hour of Terror.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly
assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's
American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester
covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration
to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working
as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday
Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the
Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy,
Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three
months.
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was
published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his
first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976,
Winchester published his second book, American
Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the
American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison
Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del
Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is
responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom.
Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced
several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific
locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.
Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor
and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK
as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story
of the creation of the Oxford English
Dictionary, the book was a New York
Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to
a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.
Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the
narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and
the Madman several times, many of which ended in books
placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that
Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was
Winchester's second New York Times best seller.
The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation
of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of
Everything, as well as the
best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World
Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San
Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the
World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of
eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose
China to the western world. Before The Perfectionists, Winchester's
most recent book was The Alice Behind
Wonderland, released March 2011.