Simon Winchester's new book, “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World,” is a tale of many triumphs, but the telling of it leaves the author dispirited. Having surveyed the progress of exactness by narrating a grand, informed sweep from the steam engines of the 18th century to today's automated assembly of microscopic computer chips, he ends up longing for a lost and less precise world.
Mr. Winchester has shown himself an engaging raconteur in 29 previous books, most notably his 1998 best seller “The Professor and the Madman,” about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. That account and its 2003 sequel, “The Meaning of Everything,” forged an ideal match between subject and author, for the Oxford-educated Mr. Winchester possesses an enviable, capacious vocabulary. His delight in words cannot be bridled, so that even “The Perfectionists,” which is, after all, a nonfiction treatment of technology, brims with amusing and rare nouns such as bagatelle, bijoux, cynosure, seraglio and susurrus. These whir smoothly alongside the argot of the machine shop—chamfered, mandrel, ratchet, worm gear—and the graduated prefixes of precision measurement, from deci and milli on down to the ever tinier nano, pico, femto, zepto and yocto.
