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Exactly
- How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
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Exactly
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Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2018
Best-selling 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, a phone, a computer, a bicycle, a 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 20th 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 coexist in society?
Critic reviews
"An ingenious argument that the dazzling advances that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the revolutions that followed owe their success to a single engineering element: precision.... An enthusiastic popular-science tour of technological marvels...readers will love the ride." (Kirkus)
"Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people." (Booklist)
"Winchester’s latest is a rollicking work of pop science that entertains and informs." (Publishers Weekly)
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What listeners say about Exactly
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sally Margetts
- 26-07-18
usual excellence
l love the way Simon dances around the subjects , bringing all manor of information into the mix.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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- Craig
- 01-05-23
fascinating
well written and good all round facts. one of the best narration. Almost David Attenborough type narration
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Mr. D. Braithwaite
- 24-02-19
Amazing
Despite my expectations, and given the subject matter, this was one of my favourite books in a long time.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Natalia
- 10-01-21
poetic and deeply researched
there was a moment at the very beginning, when I wasn't sure whether this book is good for a lay person. it is very good, as it transpired soon. quite gripping stories of inventions and inventors, history and science beautifully woven together.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Denis Rono
- 17-09-18
Well worth it
Beautifully written and beautifully read. My only gripe with the book is that is it not longer an does not contain more charming stories about precision engineering.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- pockets
- 26-11-18
Fantastic
A really interesting book. Well read and fascinating. It was an insight into the fabric of the modern world.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- J. D. Barnell
- 12-02-20
Inaccurate...
Mr Winchester does himself no favours here, either blinded wilfully or otherwise by his love of metal/mechanics he ignores many first peoples remarkable and very precise use of some of the most difficult materials known, using only the most rudimentary tools. In the most challenging conditions creating calendars, solar clocks, colossal temples and walls of stone so closely fitted they have withstood 1000's of years of seismic activity..and still fit together so closely you cannot push a cigarette paper between them, let alone the inticate jewellery and art of ancient Egypt, the remarkable tiny gold pins from Englands own stoneage craftsmen , ancient hand cut gemstones of exquisite precision, the masons of cathedrals, in fact a plethora of subject matter is conspicuous by its absence. It is also to be noted that his dismissal of the Antikethera mechanism as neither precise nor accurate is frankly myopic, the wonder of this item is in it's very manufacture, the techniques needed and used centuries before the like would be seen again, as he himself says "the lettering chased in millimetre high clarity" - how do you do that without a precise tool? To be precise this story is not accurate.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Leon
- 06-05-20
I never knew THAT
A splendidly wriiten book, tastefully read.
Opening up very intricate and highly technical topics in a style that is easily accessible to the uninformed mind. Briliantly done!
This book is a rich source of understanding of the intracies of aparantlly mundane things. It offers numerous conversation topics and equips one with the right to exclaim in conversation: "Did you know that!?" .
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- DS Cochrane
- 10-11-20
So good I have now listened to it four times
Such a wonderful storyteller and such a compelling story.
Has made me reevaluate so many facets of my life,
Cannot recommend this enough.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Olwyn Kelly
- 12-04-20
Fascinating
Highly entertaining account of the increasingly exacting tolerances achieved by engineers as the decades went by. Most impressive was the reflection on the desirability or otherwise of yet more precision. The author obviously values handcraft at least as highly as the most high tech machining.
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