內容簡介
內容簡介 「溫徹斯特的新作，是娛樂、警告大眾的響亮之作。」─出版家周刊在本書中，溫徹斯特一路從工業時代到現代，跟隨著科技發展的軌跡，試著挖掘大量製造的秘密，他發現，整個製造業的興起關鍵就在於「精準」。回到十八世紀英國的工業革命，溫徹斯特介紹了許多關鍵人物，包括鑄鐵先鋒約翰‧威爾金森、精神科學先鋒亨利‧莫斯里、天文學者傑西‧拉姆斯登等人，以他們的故事來說明標準浮現的契機。當時許多度量衡出現了統一的標準，而依這樣的標準創造出的機器又生產出更多的機器，度量衡和工具的精準促成了許多物品的量產。為什麼「精準」那麼重要？我們又用了哪些工具來達到「精準」？誰發明了這些標準？人類制定的準則和大自然有辦法和平共存嗎？等問題，溫徹斯特在書中也一一解釋。Bestselling author Simon Winchester 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 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. Exactly 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. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
