fiefoe

Simon Winchester wrote a nice and uplifting read for the layperson who wants to be impressed by people who work with tangible things.

It was evidently an object of some quality, well worn and cared for, and made of varnished oak... My father set the box down carefully and lit his pipe: the mysterious pieces, more than a hundred of them, glinted from the coal fire’s flames. <> He took out two of the largest pieces and laid them on the linen tablecloth. My mother, rightly suspecting that, like so many of the items my father brought home from the shop floor to show me, they would be covered with a thin film of machine oil, gave a little cry of exasperation and ran back into the kitchen... They were not at all magnetic, he added, Now... he said, pick up the top one. Just the top one. And so, with one hand, I did as I was told—except that upon my picking up the topmost piece, the other one came along with it... No magic, my father said. All six of the sides, he explained, are just perfectly, impeccably, exactly flat. They had been machined with such precision that there were no asperities whatsoever on their surfaces that might allow air to get between and form a point of weakness. They were so perfectly flat that the molecules of their faces bonded with one another when they were joined together, and it became well-nigh impossible to break them apart from one another, though no one knows exactly why. They could only be slid apart; that was the only way.
He wore a permanently incised frown as he sat before the business end of a special lathe—German, my father said; very expensive—watching the cutting edge of a notching tool as it whirled at invisible speed, cooled by a constant stream of a cream-like oil-and-water mixture. The machine hunted and pecked at a small brass dowel, skimming as it did so microscopic coils of yellow metal from its edges as the rod was slowly rotated. I watched intently as, by some curiously magical process, an array of newly cut tiny teeth steadily appeared incised into the metal’s outer margins.
a Phantom V’s crankshaft: What impressed him most was that these shafts, which weighed many scores of pounds, had been finished by hand and were so finely balanced that, once set spinning on a test bench, they had no inclination to stop spinning,
a scientific glassblower: The few hundred members of this somewhat exclusive calling specialize in making glass instruments of great delicacy and complexity for use largely in chemical laboratories. They have a journal, Fusion; they hold conventions; and they have a hero, a Japanese American immigrant named Mitsugi Ohno,... most famous for having found a way to blow a Klein bottle,
Precision has a definite and probably unassailable date of birth. Precision is something that developed over time, it has grown and changed and evolved, and it has a future that is to some quite obvious and to others, puzzlingly, somewhat uncertain. Precision’s existence, in other words, enjoys the trajectory of a narrative, though it might well be that the shape of that trajectory will turn out to be more a parabola than a linear excursion into the infinite.
The shells that endured this beating—and they would be randomly distributed... —would, as a result, not fit into the gun barrels out on the battlefield. There would, in consequence, be (and entirely randomly) a spate of misfires of the guns. <> It was an elegant diagnosis,.. It took him eleven bottles of Johnnie Walker to get from Cairo (via a temporary aerodrome in no less exotic a wartime stopover than Timbuktu) to Miami
If you describe something with great accuracy, you describe it as closely as you possibly can to what it is, to its true value. If you describe something with great precision, you do so in the greatest possible detail, even though that detail may not necessarily be the true value of the thing being described... In summary, accuracy is true to the intention; precision is true to itself.
the Antikythera mechanism: Except that after sitting for two years in a drawer in Athens, overlooked and yet all the while patiently drying itself out, the sorry-looking lump fell apart. It sundered itself into three pieces, revealing within, and to the astonishment of all, a mess of more than thirty metallic and cleverly meshing gearwheels... the remains of a miniaturized and neatly boxed mechanical device, an analog computer, essentially, with dials and pointers and rudimentary instructions for how to use it. It was a device that “calculated and displayed celestial information... the remains of a miniaturized and neatly boxed mechanical device, an analog computer, essentially, with dials and pointers and rudimentary instructions for how to use it. It was a device that “calculated and displayed celestial information... though the Greeks possessed (as we now know from the existence of the mechanism) the wherewithal to harness clockwork gears and make them into timekeepers, they never did so. The penny never dropped.
the “appointed hour” (a phrase that gained currency only in the sixteenth century, by which time public mechanical clocks were widely on display).
Longitude meridians mark the time difference between places, as the planet turns through 360 degrees every twenty-four hours, so each hour is equivalent to a drawn meridian of 15 degrees of longitude. But the time difference, and thus the longitude, can be worked out only if the time back at the home port is known by the ship at sea (its own local time being comparatively easy to determine from the sun and the stars).
John Harrison: oils that became notoriously more viscous with age and had the trying effect of slowing down most clockwork movements. To solve this problem, he made all his gear trains first of boxwood and then of the dense, nonfloating Caribbean hardwood Lignum vitae, combined in both cases with pivots made of brass. He also designed an extraordinary escapement mechanism, the ticking heart of the clock, that had no sliding parts (and hence no friction, either) and that is still known as a grasshopper escapement because one of the components jumps out of engagement with the escape wheel, (Lignum vitae, the hard and self-lubricating wood)
Many of the improvements that this former carpenter and viola player, bell tuner and choirmaster—for eighteenth-century polymaths were polymaths indeed—included in each have gone on to become essential components of modern precision machinery: Harrison created the encaged roller bearing, for example, which became the predecessor to the ball bearing... And the bimetallic strip, invented solely by Harrison in an attempt to compensate for changes in temperature in his H3 timekeeper, is still employed in scores of mundane essentials: in thermostats, toasters, electric kettles, and their like.
Rupert Gould: got H1 to work again after 165 years. The restoration effort consumed 10 years of his life, a life memorialized in a 2000 TV drama, Longitude, in which he was played by the actor Jeremy Irons.
H4: In place of the oscillating beam balances that made the magic madness of his large clocks so spectacular to see, he substituted a temperature-controlled spiral mainspring, together with a fast-beating balance wheel that spun back and forth at the hitherto unprecedented rate of some eighteen thousand times an hour. He also had an automatic remontoir, so-called, which rewound the mainspring eight times a minute, keeping the tension constant, the beats unvarying... to keep the needed application of oil to a minimum, Harrison introduced, where possible, bearings made of diamond, one of the early instances of a jeweled escapement.
John Wilkinson: And the man who accomplished that single feat, of creating something with great exactitude and making it not by hand but with a machine, and, moreover, with a machine that was specifically created to create it—... a machine that makes machines, known today as a “machine tool,” was, is, and will long remain an essential part of the precision story—was the eighteenth-century Englishman denounced for his supposed lunacy because of his passion for iron,
During Wilkinson’s lifetime, the newly created Great Britain was very much in a fighting mood, indulging in such conflicts as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, with Spain; the War of the Austrian Succession, against France; the Seven Years’ War, with France and Spain together; the American Revolutionary War; the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War; and then, once Ireland joined England and Scotland to make the United Kingdom, the Napoleonic Wars.
the still-standing great Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale that attracts tourist millions still today, and is regarded by most modern Britons as the Industrial Revolution’s most potent and recognizable symbol.
Up until then, naval cannons... were cast hollow... his new idea... solid. This, for a start, had the effect of guaranteeing the integrity of the iron itself—there were fewer parts that cooled early... Yet the true secret was in the boring of the cannon hole. Both ends of the operation, the part that did the boring and the part to be bored, had to be held in place, rigid and immovable. That was a canonical truth, as true today as it was in the eighteenth century, for to cut or polish something into dimensions that are fully precise, both tool and workpiece have to be clasped and clamped as tightly as possible to secure immobility.
James Watt: the central inefficiency of the engine he was examining was that the cooling water injected into the cylinder to condense the steam and produce the vacuum also managed to cool the cylinder itself. To keep the engine running efficiently, though, the cylinder needed to be kept as hot as possible at all times, so the cooling water should perhaps condense the steam not in the cylinder but in a separate vessel,.. to make matters even more efficient, the fresh steam could be introduced at the top of the piston rather than the bottom, with stuffing of some sort placed and packed into the cylinder around the piston rod to prevent any steam from leaking out in the process. <> These two improvements (the inclusion of a separate steam condenser and the changing of the inlet pipes to allow for the injection of new steam into the upper rather than the lower part of the main cylinder)... changed Newcomen’s so-called fire-engine into a proper and fully functioning steam-powered machine.
the engine was roaring along at full power, thumping and thudding and whirring and chuffing—and now all perfectly visibly because, for the first time since Watt had begun his experiments, there was no leaking steam... Wilkinson had solved his problem, and the Industrial Revolution—we can say now what those two never imagined—could now formally begin.
Henry Maudslay: It was a padlock, oval shaped, of modest size, and with a smooth and uncomplicated external appearance. On its face was written, in a small script legible only to those who pressed their faces close to the window glass, the following words: THE ARTIST WHO CAN MAKE AN INSTRUMENT THAT WILL PICK OR OPEN THIS LOCK SHALL RECEIVE 200 GUINEAS THE MOMENT IT IS PRODUCED...
Joseph Bramah, locksmith extraordinaire, also invented the fountain pen,... involving his particular other fascination with the behavior of liquids when subjected to pressure. He invented the hydraulic press,
Henry Maudslay turned out to be a transformative figure. First of all, he solved Bramah’s supply problems in an inkling... Maudslay created a machine to make them... devised a means of cutting metal screws, efficiently, precisely, and fast... Maudslay, Sons and Field placed in the bow window of the firm’s first little workshop, on Margaret Street in Marylebone, a single item of which the principal was most proud—and that was a five-foot-long, exactly made, and perfectly straight industrial screw made of brass.
“the mother tool of the industrial age.”: Moreover, with a screw that was made using his slide rest and his technique, and with a lathe constructed of iron and not with the wooden frame he and Bramah had used initially, he could machine things to a standard of tolerance of one in one ten-thousandth of an inch. Precision was being born before all London’s eyes.
systems of tough wooden pulleys that were known simply to navy men as blocks—pulley blocks, part of a warship’s arrangements known within and beyond the maritime world as block and tackle. <> A large ship might have as many as fourteen hundred pulley blocks, which were of varying types and sizes depending on the task required. A block with a single pulley might be all that was needed to allow a sailor to hoist a topsail,...
Both Bentham and Brunel had close relatives much more famous than they. Samuel’s older brother was Jeremy Bentham, the distinguished philosopher, jurist, and prison reformer whose fully clothed remains, his auto-icon, are still seated in a chair in University College London. Brunel’s son was the memorably named Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of so much that remains spectacularly Victorian in today’s Britain
find an engineer who would and could construct such a set of never-before-made machines, and ensure that they were capable of the repetitious making, with great precision, of the scores of thousands of the wooden pulley blocks the navy so keenly needed... saw, prominent in the bow window, the famed five-foot-long brass screw that Maudslay himself had made on his lathe. The Frenchman went inside, spoke to some of the eighty employees in the machine shop, and then to the principal himself, and came away firm in the belief that if one man in England could do the work Brunel needed, here he was.
So there were machines that sawed wood, that clamped wood, that morticed wood, that drilled holes and tinned pins of iron and polished surfaces and grooved and trimmed and scored and otherwise shaped and smoothed the blocks’ way to completion. A whole new vocabulary was suddenly born: there were ratchets and cams, shafts and shapers, bevels and worm gears, formers and crown wheels, coaxial drills and burnishing engines.
The Block Mills still stand as testament to many things, most famously to the sheer perfection of each and every one of the hand-built iron machines housed inside. So well were they made—they were masterpieces, most modern engineers agree—that most were still working a century and a half later; the Royal Navy made its last pulley blocks in 1965.
Luddism, as it is known today, was a short-lived backlash—it started in the northern Midlands in 1811—against the mechanization of the textile industry.. The government of the day* was spooked, and briefly introduced the death penalty for anyone convicted of frame breaking; some seventy Luddites were hanged,
Henry Maudslay: two further contributions to the universe of intricacy and perfection. One of them was a concept, the other a device. Both are essentials, even at this remove of two centuries,... Maudslay realized, a machine tool can make an accurate machine only if the surface on which the tool is mounted is perfectly flat, is perfectly plane, exactly level, its geometry entirely exact... “to grind one surface perfectly flat, it is . . . necessary to grind three at the same time.” ... by smearing each with a colored paste and rubbing the two surfaces together and seeing where the color rubs off and where it doesn’t, as at a dentist’s, an engineer can compare the flatness of one plate with that of the other.
a seventeenth-century astronomer, William Gascoigne... had embedded a pair of calipers in the eyeglass of a telescope. With a fine-threaded screw, the user was able to close the needles around each side of the image of the celestial body (the moon, most often) as it appeared in the eyepiece. A quick calculation, involving the pitch of the screw in inches, the number of turns needed for the caliper to fully enclose the object, and the exact focal length of the telescope lens, would enable the viewer to work out the “size” of the moon in seconds of arc.
As with Gascoigne’s invention of a century before, the bench micrometer’s measurement was based on the use of a long and skillfully made screw. It employed the basic principle of a lathe, except that instead of having a slide rest with cutting or boring tools mounted upon it, there would be two perfectly flat blocks, one attached to the headstock, the other to the tailstock, and with the gap between them opened or closed with a turn of the leadscrew... So accurate was Henry Maudslay’s bench micrometer that it was nicknamed “the Lord Chancellor,” as no one would dare have argued with it... this invention of his could measure down to one one-thousandth of an inch and, according to some, maybe even one ten-thousandth of an inch: to a tolerance of 0.0001.
By arguing this, the French smiths were voicing much the same complaints as the Luddites had grumbled over in England: that precision was stripping their skills of worth. This argument would be heard many times in the future as the steady march of precision engineering advanced across Europe, the Americas, the world.
Then came 1789 and the unholy trinity of the Revolution, Gribeauval’s death, and the Terror. The château was stormed, and Blanc’s workshop was sacked by the rioters. His sponsor was suddenly no longer there to protect him, and there was a fast-growing, eventually fanatical, opposition among the sansculottes toward mechanization, toward efficiencies that favored the middle classes, toward techniques that put the honest work of artisans and craftsmen to disadvantage. By the turn of the century, the idea of interchangeable parts had withered and died in France
this government contract to make the first batch of muskets: ten thousand by one account, fifteen thousand by others. The winner of the contract... was one Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts... To any informed engineer, however, the name Eli Whitney signifies something very different: confidence man, trickster, fraud, charlatan. And his alleged charlatanry derives almost wholly from his association with the gun trade, with precision manufacturing, and with the promise of being able to deliver weapons assembled from interchangeable parts.
In 1817, in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, Blanchard invented a lathe that made lasts for shoes. It was a stroke of inventive genius: he simply placed a metal template of a shoe in his machine and, using a pantograph connected to a series of blades, attached the template to the shapeless hunk of ash, a last-to-be that was fixed in the path of a series of sharp knives. Turn the template, trace its outline with the pantograph rods, and let the other ends of the pantograph in turn press the blades against the timber—and presto! In ninety seconds or less, an exact copy of the template would be there, in freshly carved wood, (缩放仪)
as Harriet Vane does when, in Gaudy Night, she listens to Oxford’s clocks, the various iterations of midnight being chimed out in “friendly disagreement.” In writing that line, Dorothy Sayers was celebrating a mild and meaningless inaccuracy from which one might well take (as I most certainly do) a considerable but inexplicable satisfaction.
1851: It was Queen Victoria’s imaginative consort, Prince Albert, who remains most publicly associated with the idea of staging a Great Exhibition. With a degree of foresight still admired two centuries on,† he came to recognize the time’s extraordinary zeitgeist, and he wished to capture its uniqueness for one shining summertime, and present it, in a grand and spectacular manner, to his public. He wished the world to hold up a mirror to itself and see just how memorable was its history, then so busily unfolding.
They were machines, great big British iron machines; machines that showed, and with a certain sense of disdain, that however obsessed America might be with the cleverness of her precisely made interchangeable parts, however pleased with the consequent beginnings of mass production and, if yet some way ahead, with the makings of the assembly line, this was a moment in British history when mechanical brute power and might were the things to be displayed and deployed.
Whitworth thought line measurement fraught with problems, as clumsy and liable to error. Instead, he favored what is called end measurement, which relied not on sight, but on the simple feel of the tightening of the measuring instrument against the two flat end surfaces of the item to be measured... Such was the principle. Whitworth, using his superb mechanical skills, created in 1859 a micrometer that followed this idea but that allowed for one complete turn of the micrometer wheel to advance the screw not by 1/20 of an inch, but by 1/4,000 of an inch, a truly tiny amount. Whitworth then incised 250 divisions on the turning wheel’s circumference,
Hobbs: It took him fifty-one hours, spread over sixteen days... He also used magnifying lenses, with brilliant lights whose minuscule beams were reflected inside the lock by means of special mirrors. He used minute brass measuring scales to see how far depressed was each slider. He used tiny hooks to pull back any slider that had been depressed too far. He had laid out beside him what resembled the contents of a surgeon’s instrument tray, minus scalpels, for the sole purpose of breaking the Bramah lock and, by doing so, asserting the superiority of American precision.
The Silver Ghost: The 40/50’s engine was so quiet, said the man from Autocar, that it was as though a sewing machine had been hidden beneath the hood. Even though it had the looks of a thumping marine engine, its full-throttle sibilance suggested that within the bowels of the car there lurked a device made for threading slivers of waxed cotton through a chemise of light silk.
Before Model T: finally, the N (cheap and light, using, for the first time, steel with added vanadium, an alloy that Henry Ford discovered in the wreckage of a crashed French racing car, and which he ordered used as extensively as possible in his future machines, as it gave the chassis added tensile strength and at a markedly lower weight).
in the making of the Model T, Henry Ford created the full-scale and presently recognizable industrial production line. <> The Model T had fewer than one hundred different parts (a modern car has more than thirty thousand). How they, no more complex than a modern washing machine, would be assembled into a working automobile was to be Henry Ford’s abiding challenge during the first two decades of the twentieth century... until 1913, when there came at last the Caramba! moment—the discovery that the workpiece could be moved along in front of the workers, who would each perform a single very ordinary and undemanding task on it as it presented itself,
Precision, in other words, is an absolute essential for keeping the unforgiving tyranny of a production line going. As far as a handmade car is concerned, though, upfront precision is quite optional.
The Swede was Carl Edvard Johansson, popularly and proudly known by every knowledgeable Swede today as the world’s Master of Measurement. He was the inventor of the set of precise pieces of perfectly flat, hardened steel known to this day as gauge blocks, slip gauges, or, to his honor and in his memory, as Johansson gauges, or quite simply, Jo blocks—the same polished steel blocks and tiny billets my father brought home to show me back in the mid-1950s as an example of what precision was truly all about... For Johansson was, by all accounts, a modest, retiring, unassuming, private, pipe-smoking, mustachioed, patient, formal, stooped, eternally avuncular son of the croft, a man who grew up on a rye farm in central Sweden and, yet, went on to change the world. The 103-piece combination gauge block set he eventually developed,... Yes, replied Johansson, it was now possible to achieve precision tolerances down to one ten-millionth of an inch, but he would not reveal exactly how.
Qantas Flight 32: It took the better part of an hour for the crew to deal with the various problems afflicting their stricken aircraft, and to work out just how to land when all manner of critical parts of the aircraft were no longer working.
But exactly what had taken place inside the engine to bring about this near catastrophe? To appreciate that, and to enter the ultraprecise but still Hadean nightmare that is the interior of a modern jet engine, requires some history—and a return to the time, not so long past, when aviation was a propeller-driven pursuit still available to the enthusiastic amateur rather than the digitized zealotry found in today’s commercial airline cockpits.
It was Frank Whittle, the first son of a Lancashire cotton factory worker turned tinkerer, who invented the jet engine... “Reciprocating engines are exhausted,” he declared. “They have hundreds of parts jerking to and fro and they cannot be made more powerful without becoming too complicated.* The engine of the future must produce two thousand horsepower with one moving part: a spinning turbine and compressor.”
Frank Whittle, five feet tall, slightly Chaplinesque in appearance, neat, punctilious, and seemingly made of compressed steel springs—as a youngster, he was a daredevil stunt flier and demon motorcyclist, an irritant to his instructors, and a mathematician of rare ability... Cadets at the time were each obliged to write a short scientific thesis on a topic that interested them, and Whittle’s paper has since become a part of aeronautical legend: with all the hubris of a young man on the make, he titled it “Future Developments in Aircraft Design.”
why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear?... the amount of air sucked into a piston engine is limited by, among other factors, the size of the cylinders. In a gas turbine, there is almost no limit: a gigantic fan at the opening of such an engine can swallow vastly more air than can be taken into a piston engine—as a rule of thumb, seventy times as much,
the firm’s senior partner, Lancelot Law Whyte, who confessed to “falling in love at first sight” with the young officer. Despite the query of his notation, he later told his wife that the experience of first meeting Whittle ... was akin to “meeting a saint in an earlier religious epoch.” Had one not known the end of the story, it might be easy to suppose that, with a beginning like this, all would inevitably end in tears. Far from it. It ends triumphantly, with the saint indeed performing all the miracles expected of him.
This was the moment (or the invention, or the personality) that took the standard model of precision and transported it from the purely mechanical world into the ethereal. What was about to be constructed was a device of transcendental beauty, and though it might be said that mankind has taken the invention of the jet engine and quite spoiled the world with it, the thing itself had then and has still elegance and integrity like few other modern creations.
But the chosen test pilot, Gerry Sayer, was apparently unable to contain himself at the smoothness of the throttle controls, and at the rapid acceleration to full power of a near-vibrationless engine, and so took the plane off for a pair of hundred-foot hops along the runway, astonishing all, and prompting an American engineer standing on the wing of a Stirling bomber almost to fall onto the ground at seeing a propellerless aircraft roaring along a runway and lifting off, if only for a few seconds. He was told to disbelieve what he had seen. German agents might have been everywhere.
once the covers are removed, everything inside is a diabolic labyrinth, a maze of fans and pipes and rotors and discs and tubes and sensors and a Turk’s head of wires of such confusion that it doesn’t seem possible that any metal thing inside it could possibly even move without striking and cutting and dismembering all the other metal things that are crammed together in such dangerously interfering proximity. Yet work and move a jet engine most certainly does
the blades of the high-pressure turbines represent the singularly truest marvel of engineering achievement—and this is primarily because the blades themselves, rotating at incredible speeds and each one of them generating during its maximum operation as much power as a Formula One racing car, operate in a stream of gases that are far hotter than the melting point of the metal from which the blades were made... it turns out to be possible to cool the blades by performing on them mechanical work of a quite astonishing degree of precision... The mechanical work involves, on one level, the drilling of hundreds of tiny holes in each blade, and of making inside each blade a network of tiny cooling tunnels, all of them manufactured at a size and to such minuscule tolerances
the new jet engines had to be huge and astonishingly powerful. They had to compress their inswept air (as much as one ton of it sucked in every second) to unimaginable pressures, they had to burn their fuel at unimaginable temperatures, and they had to create an interior holocaust, a maelstrom of fire, that tested every molecule of every metal piece that whirled and careened around inside. <> This is where Rolls-Royce’s internal Blade Cooling Research Group, founded in the early 1970s, plays its part in the saga.
They worked out that it should be possible, with highly precise machining and the mathematical abilities of very powerful computers, to create an ultrathin film of relatively cold air that would swaddle each blade as it whirled around inside the engine, and which would protect it, thermally, from the hellish atmosphere beyond. The layer of cold air need be less than a millimeter thick,
Some of this cool air, the Rolls-Royce engineers realized, could actually be diverted before it reached the combustion chamber, and could be fed into tubes in the disc onto which the blades were bolted. From there it could be directed into a branching network of channels or tunnels that had been machined into the interior of the blade itself. And now that the blade was filled with cool air... cores of unimaginably tiny holes were then drilled into the blade surface, drilled with great precision and delicacy and in configurations that had been dictated by the computers, and drilled down through the blade alloy until each one of them reached just into the cool-air-filled tunnels—thus immediately allowing the cool air within to escape or seep or flow or thrust outward, and onto the gleaming hot surface of the blade.
All who see such a jet engine turbine blade, and who know something of its manufacture, see in its making the most sublime of engineering poetry, much like the finest of Rolls-Royce motorcars,... The most proprietary and commercially sensitive aspect of the blades, aside from the complex geometry of the hundreds of tiny pinholes, is the fact that the blades are grown from, incredibly, a single crystal of metallic nickel alloy. This makes them extremely strong
Very basically, the molten metal (an alloy of nickel, aluminum, chromium, tantalum, titanium, and five other rare-earth elements that Rolls-Royce coyly refuses to discuss) is poured into a mold that has at its base a little and curiously three-turned twisted tube, which resembles nothing more than the tail of P. G. Wodehouse’s Empress of Blandings, the fictional Lord Emsworth’s prize pig. This “pigtail” is attached to a plate that is cooled with water, and the whole arrangement, once it is filled with liquid metal, is slowly withdrawn from the furnace, allowing the metal, equally slowly, to solidify. <> This it does, first, at the cool end of the pigtail, but because the mold here is so twisted, only the fastest-growing crystals and those with their molecules distributed with what is called a face-centered cubic arrangement, for complex reasons known only to students of the arcana of metallurgy, manage to get through. And through this magic of metallurgy, the entire blade then assembles itself from the one crystal that makes it along the pigtail, and ends up with all its molecules lined up evenly.
drill the hundreds of tiny holes down into the cooling channels. Electrical discharge machining, or EDM, as it is more generally known, employs just a wire and a spark, both of them tiny, the whole process directed by computer and inspected by humans, using powerful microscopes, as it is happening. The process is all but silent, and it is in many ways more melting than drilling.
Nowadays, it is perhaps the relative paucity of human supervision in engineering fields where human lives are at stake that has steadily become a more pressing concern... Precision engineering, in this industry in particular, does now appear to have reached some kind of limit, where the presence of humans, once essential to maintaining the attainment of the precise, can on occasion be more of a drawback than a boon—as the investigation into the Qantas Airways jet engine failure amply illustrates.
it was decided to complete first the entirety of the hub assembly that separates the high-pressure from the intermediate-pressure areas of the engine—and then and only then, once the pipe had been fitted into place in this assembly, to drill out the tube to its design specifications. This proved to be exceptionally difficult, however, because now parts of the pipe could not be readily seen,
There are certain ineradicable truths in the world of optical hyperprecision, and one of them, by near-universal agreement, is that the best Leica lenses are and long have been of unsurpassed quality, and deservedly represent the cynosure of the optical arts.
Even though Ernst Leitz famously helped his Jewish employees to leave Germany in droves, his cameras were much used by Hitler’s military.
Nero, myopic in more ways than one, was said to have watched gladiatorial contests through a conveniently curved emerald.
The multi-element arrangements that followed, and that have dominated fine lens making ever since, began primitively enough, with just the two lenses pressed together. In these early examples, one lens would be made of a glass with specific refractive properties, such as so-called crown glass, which has a very low refractive index; and the other would be made of so-called flint glass, which has a very different chemistry, a high refractive index, and very low dispersion. Grind them into complementary shapes and press and cement the two together, and you come up with what is called a doublet... The crown glass lens deals with one problem, the flint glass lens with another—and the two together are ground so perfectly that, optically, they act as one, with one physical effect on the light, variously now tinkered with by its two components.
Optics designers are today rather like orchestral conductors, maestros who marshal and corral morsels of carefully shaped and exquisitely ground glass of varying chemistries and optical properties into configurations that will provide the most harmonic and pleasing management of light for the task the lens is designed to perform.
Whereas most camera makers work today to an industry standard of 1/1,000 of an inch, and with Canon and Nikon working their mechanicals to a supertight 1/1,500 of an inch, Leica bodies are made to 1/100 of a millimeter, or 1/2,500 of an inch. And with lenses, the tolerances are even tighter. The refractive index of Leica optical glassware is computed to ±0.0002 percent; the dispersion figures (the so-called Abbe numbers) are measured to ±0.2 percent, against an industry-agreed international standard of 0.8 percent.
Hubble Space Telescope: ever before had Corning made so challenging a piece of glass. Never before had Perkin-Elmer been given so demanding a remit: the NASA contract required the firm to grind and polish the finished fused-quartz glass piece, taking away at least two hundred pounds of material in doing so, and shape the immense tablet into precise convexity, with a surface of a smoothness never achieved or desired before. No part was to deviate by more than one-millionth of an inch. The satin-smooth surface was to be such that if the mirror were the size of the Atlantic Ocean, no point on it would be higher than three or four inches above sea level.
all manner of delays plagued even this period in the mirror’s history—especially the so-called teacup affair, when a teacup-size web of internal cracks and fissures was found deep inside the glass, and had to be cut out and reamed and remelted, in a process akin to brain surgery. Finally, in May 1980, already nine months late, but with the mirror’s basic shape achieved, the great glass object was carefully trucked to the hitherto secret facility outside Danbury, and the serious polishing began.
a null corrector. It was a metal cylinder about the size of a beer keg, and it held a pair of mirrors and a lens. Laser light was bounced against the two mirrors, then through the lens, where it would be directed to and bounced off the polished surface of the mirror before being passed back to the corrector’s lens and mirrors once again, and to the point where the light originated. If the polishing was perfect, then the light going out and the light coming back would match, wavelength for wavelength, and would produce in a photograph a pattern of straight and parallel lines. If the mirror was not the desired shape and smoothness, then the waves would interfere with one another, and the photograph would display an interference pattern.
It turned out, though, that a small portion of the coating on the cap had worn off, and the laser focused on, and was reflected by, that part of the cap, instead of traveling on through the hole to the rod’s metal and similarly reflective tip. The cap’s surface was exactly 1.3 mm higher than the tip of the rod, so the laser interferometer calculated the distance incorrectly by that exact amount... So, resourceful as technicians often have to be, they made a decision. They would put three household washers into the null corrector to force the tiny lens 1.3 mm lower. They had to do this because the laser could not possibly be wrong.
the null corrector was wrong. The NASA inquiry was able to demonstrate this because the Perkin-Elmer mirror makers had left it in the testing room, and had left the testing room exactly as it had been when they made their final measurements on the completed mirror, nearly a decade before.* The result was that at the edges of the mirror the tiny error in the metering rod, and thus in the null corrector, had produced a change in the measurement of the primary mirror’s shape that amounted to a 2.2-micron flattening around its edges—the famous one-fiftieth-of-the-thickness-of-a-human-hair deviation from design.
Why not, mused our drenched and ever-more-cleansed engineer shower taker, mount the telescope’s corrective optics onto a rod like this? Why not have them folded flat as they were slid into position, to be extended automatically into their preplanned and precisely determined base locations, then unfolded, just like the showerhead, into the correct angles and exactly calculated places?.. Each would have the same function: it would intercept the beams of starlight that had been reflected from the secondary mirror and that passed back through the center hole of the ruined primary mirror. They would then act on these beams and, much like contact lenses or corrective glasses
I had worked on this rig for just one month. I was not yet twenty-three years old. The rig was worth ten million dollars, and Amoco Petroleum was renting her for eight thousand dollars an hour. Putting her down in the right place, exactly, was now, quite ludicrously, all down to me... In due course, I left the rig, then the company, and eventually the profession of petroleum geologist altogether, but the knowledge that I had once helped locate a nine-thousand-ton drilling rig over a Permian salt dome in the heaving middle of an ocean, and had managed to do so with sufficient accuracy to create a flowing gas well, stayed with me for many years.
It was Sputnik, ... reckoned they could probably determine exactly where the satellite was by recording and then analyzing its radio signals... The frequency change they observed was the Doppler effect... and for the first time ever, it was shown by this pair of physicists to be both detectable and measurable in a satellite signal.
the chairman of the Applied Physics Laboratory, Frank McClure, realized that his two young colleagues had unwittingly stumbled upon the makings of an application that could have worldwide use... if an observer on the ground could establish with precision the position of a satellite in space, then the opposite, the numerical reciprocal, could be true as well... the corollary: that a satellite navigation system based on this simple Doppler principle could do for ships and trucks and trains and even for ordinary civilians, mobile or stationary, what the sextant, the compass, and the chronometer had done for centuries past for mariners,
in 1973, a Vermont country doctor’s son, Roger Easton, came up with something that very clearly could. It involved the question of time, and of the clocks that record its passage. Indeed, the physical principle involved is known as passive ranging, and in its essence, it is disconcertingly simple... He knows for certain, though, that both clocks are actually showing the same time. He knows also that the speed of the signal between them, the speed of light, is a constant. So the discrepancy must therefore be the result of the only unknown variable in this scenario—and that, clearly, is the distance between Detroit and London over which the signal has to travel.
the notion that this was a duel to the death between Doppler-based systems and clock-based systems took some while to be distilled from a mess of conflicting technologies, and personalities, and branches of the disciplined services.
with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions
There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world. In 2015, the four major chip-making firms were making 14 trillion transistors every single second.
The group, later to be known by Shockley’s dismissive term for them, the Traitorous Eight, formed in 1957 a new company... named Fairchild Semiconductor
The moody, solitary, and austere Jean Hoerni came up with the idea that allowed a coating of silicon oxide on top of a pure silicon crystal to be used as an integral part of the transistor, as an insulator, and with no hills or valleys, no mesas, to give the resulting device unnecessary bulk.
Robert Noyce: might it not be possible to put flattened versions of the other components of a full-fledged electrical circuit (resistors, capacitors, oscillators, diodes, and the like) onto the same silicon oxide covering of a silicon wafer? Could not the circuitry, in other words, be integrated?... then could the circuits not be printed onto the silicon wafer photographically...? using a device much like an enlarger, but with its lenses refashioned to make its images not bigger but very much smaller, the image could be printed, as it were, onto the silicon oxide of the wafer.
the smaller the chips became, the cheaper they were to make. They also became more efficient: the smaller the transistor, the less electricity needed to make it work, and the faster it could operate—and so, on that level, its operations were cheaper, too. <> No other industry with a fondness for small (the makers of wristwatches being an example) equates tininess with cheapness.
The Skylake chips made by Intel at the time of this writing have transistors that are sixty times smaller than the wavelength of light used by human eyes, and so are literally invisible (whereas the transistors in a 4004 could quite easily be seen through a child’s microscope).
Rooms within the ASML facility in Holland are very much cleaner than that. They are clean to the far more brutally restrictive demands of ISO number 1, which permits only 10 particles of just one-tenth of a micron per cubic meter, and no particles of any size larger than that. A human being existing in a normal environment swims in a miasma of air and vapor that is five million times less clean.
If the beams are of exactly the same length, the circular image of the recombined red light will be amplified; the light will be as bright as it was before its beams were split in two. On the other hand, if the two beams differ in length, they will destructively interfere with one another, and the detector will register rings of color that will tell the observers and analysts by how much the difference is. <> LIGO is very basically an experiment that employs a pair (soon to be a trio) of enormous interferometers of this quite simple design. Anyone who has used an interferometer would easily recognize, if flying five miles high over the central desert of Washington State, or over the lush forests of south central Louisiana, the two LIGO instruments for what they are: the two long arms at precisely ninety degrees, the building where the two arms meet and where the splitting mirror must be
Normally—not that there is much normal in the world of gravitational waves—observers look out only during observing runs. Yet because nothing had been seen or heard during all the runs of the previous thirteen years—the first basic LIGO was built in the late 1990s and started looking for waves in 2002—and with hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer treasure having been spent, with nothing to show for it, there was a sense of, if not quiet desperation, then at least institutionalized eagerness for a result.
the 160-ton ASML machines in Holland, which allow for the placing of seven billion transistors onto a wafer of silicon no larger than a fingernail, and the airline hanger–cum–train station vastness of the LIGO machinery that has been established to detect what one author has called “gravity’s whispers.” <> Both sets of machinery have been designed to deal with the tiny, the faint, the microscopic, the atomic, the cosmic—yet both sets of machinery are so Victorian-grand in design and so magisterial in scale, far bigger than the great machines of the past,... Where precision once employed small machines to construct big things, it now employs big machines to create, or to detect, tiny ones.
Now, the component at the heart of what LIGO’s David Reitze publicly described as “the most precise measuring instrument ever built” is a cylinder, too. Unlike Wilkinson’s, this one is solid, a forty-kilogram cylinder known as a test mass and made of fused silica that reflects all but one of every 3.3 million photons that hit it. The silica is tooled and lapped and polished to an immaculate flatness. It is suspended in a cradle by a network of 400-micron-thick silica filaments, and is balanced by an array of weights of glass and metal and magnets and coils that will allow it to be tested and measured by the laser that will hit it 280 times each fraction of a second, in order to measure the distance of the length of the tube at the end of which it lives, and which thereby detects whether a gravitational wave has passed through... the light reflected by them can be measured to one ten-thousandth of the diameter of a proton... The distance in miles of 4.3 light-years... It is now known with absolute certainty that the cylindrical masses on LIGO can help to measure that vast distance to within the width of a single human hair.
Before what became known in horological circles as the 1969 quartz revolution, or shock, or crisis, there had been sixteen hundred Swiss watch houses. By the end of the next decade, there were only six hundred
the Grand Seiko: hand-making some of the most unassumingly magnificent watches ever made. These watches may not be as famous as Patek or Rolex or Omega, but they consistently win all the Swiss timekeeping awards, and to those who know, they are of peerless quality.
The evidence of the impermanence of the precise was everywhere. <> The more perfect of the trees, the cedars and the pines—they also were ruined, splintering and collapsing... But the bamboo was still there—imprecise, imperfect, but surviving.
lacquer ware: More drying, more maturing; polishing with fragments of charcoal and soapstone, chamois leather and clay-soaked silk—the surface now gleams and reflects, though with nothing resembling either glitter or gaudiness, but rather, a near-living texture of a gentle softness, ready only now for the application of the finest paints,
The story of the triangulation of the meridian in France and Spain, and which was carried out by Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre over six tumultuous years during the worst of the postrevolutionary terror, is the stuff of heroic adventure. On numerous occasions the pair escaped great violence (but not jail time) only by the skin of their teeth.
the notion of using atoms and the wavelength of the light they can emit as a standard for measuring everything... It was a late nineteenth-century Massachusetts genius named Charles Sanders Peirce who had that first moment, who first tied the two together. Few men of his generation can have been more brilliant—or more infuriatingly, insanely troublesome. He was many things—a mathematician, a philosopher, a surveyor, a logician, a philanderer of heroic proportions, and a man crippled with pain
some will spy a hint of romance in the kelvin, which is defined as 1/273.16th of the temperature of the triple point—when liquid, solid, and vapor all coexist—of water. But not just any old water: the definition requires the use of what is known as Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, a cocktail of various distilled waters drawn from all the oceans—and yet perversely named for the capital city of a landlocked country about as far from the sea as it is possible for any part of Europe to be.
For many centuries China divided its days in decimal fashion, but did so somewhat capriciously—there were extended periods of Chinese history when the basic unit, the ke, differed markedly in its duration from other periods. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits brought harmony to Chinese timekeeping, declared the ke to be a quarter of an hour, and thence gently shepherded China into diurnal conformity with the rest of the world.
The greater problem, recognized from antiquity, is that the length of the day itself turned out to be almost infinitely variable, due to a range of reasons both local—such as the frictional effects of the tides—and astronomical—such as changes in the Earth’s rotation, the wobbling-top precession of its axis, the steady slowing (and occasional random speeding-up) of the Earth’s period of rotation.
With a quartz crystal, it was the simple and easily knowable property of its vibration under the influence of an electrical charge that made it so attractive a candidate for timekeeping. With an atom, the frequency was a more delicate thing: it required that an electron in orbit around the nucleus of a candidate element be persuaded to shift to another orbit—to make a quantum leap, or a quantum jump, this being the origin of the phrase. It had been known since the nineteenth century that when an electron performs this leap from its ground state to another energy level, it emits a highly stable burp of electromagnetic radiation.

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