A fine balance | 7 June 2018

Arguably, the statue in Trafalgar Square should not be of Nelson but of Henry Maudslay. He had started out as a 12-year-old powder monkey, fetching gunpowder on Navy ships, but soon revealed himself to be a brilliant engineer. In the early 1800s, Maudslay built ‘the first precision-made machines in the world’. They produced pulley blocks, ‘the essential parts of a sailing ship’s rigging’, which allowed the Royal Navy to ‘travel, police, and, for a while, rule the world’s oceans’, writes Simon Winchester. The machines outfitted the ships that defeated Maudslay’s hero, Napoleon. Most of Maudslay’s superb devices in Portsmouth docks were ‘still working a century and a half later; the Royal Navy made its last pulley blocks in 1965,’ notes Winchester.

Machines shape human history. But they get little attention, in part because few writers understand them. Winchester, a veteran craftsman of readable non-fiction, has written a flawed book about a crucial subject: the birth, rise and possible end of precision technology.

His father, a precision engineer, would sometimes bring home pieces of machines from one of his factories and (to his wife’s chagrin) show them to his son on the dinner table. A fascination was born — then reignited by an email from a stranger in Florida in 2011: ‘Why not write a book on the history of precision?’

The first person who ever tried to produce a precision instrument was probably an unknown Greek artisan in the second century BC. Around 1900, Greek fishermen diving for sponges found ‘a telephone directory-size lump of corroded and calcified bronze and wood’. The lump was ignored for decades, but in 2006 a paper in Nature identified it as a mechanical device that calculated (with fantastic inaccuracy) lunar phases and planetary movements.