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"Un tour por las maravillas tecnolgicas del mundo, desde la revolucin industrial hasta la actualidad. La perfeccin no existe, pero quienes se empearon en alcanzarla han tenido ms importancia en nuestra vida cotidiana de lo que pensamos. Este es un tourpor las maravillas tecnolgicas, desde la revolucin industrial hasta la actualidad. Hace comprensible por qu funcionan inventos como el avin, la lente de una cmara, las mquinas de rayos X, el telescopio Hubble, el friegaplatos, el microchip, el smartphone, y tambin por qu pueden fallar.Simon Winchester es un maestro de la narracin, y todas las personas, lugares y eventos sobre los que escribe apasionadamente cobran vida con exquisito detalle, public el New York Journal of Books. A pesar de ser un popular escritor, hasta ahora era desconocido en espaol.Considerado por la Royal Society britnica uno de los mejores libros cientficos de 2018 y por The Wall Street Journal un cuento extraordinario y propulsor, este ensayo nos deslumbra con la historia de la ingeniera a travs de curiosas ancdotas." -- contracoberta… (más)
This is the story of precision engineering from precisions of .1 to 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 01, or early cannons and steam engines through guns and automobiles, modern jet airplanes, then ultimately to modern microprocessors and the tools scientists are using to investigate the universe at infinite and infinitesimal scales.
I don’t think this book is perfect, but it’s pretty well written and provides a cohesive narrative of how we, as humans, have sought and achieved more and more ridiculous levels of replicable precision and how even small imperfections can cause catastrophic damage with the tolerance high performance products are designed for. It’s not at the top of my list, but it’s a pretty good read and you’ll learn a little. ( )
Contemplating the start of this book, my first thought is to wonder how I managed to avoid reading anything by the author until this relatively late date in time. As for the worth of this particular book, Winchester is at his best giving the reader the human side of the great technologists at the start of the Precision Revolution (particularly if they're British); I know that I derived a great deal of enjoyment from the assorted stories. However, the book does tend to attenuate out after Winchester tells the tale of Frank Whittle, main father of the jet engine, and other folks' nit-picking in other venues does temper my enjoyment. ( )
This is a rather short book the covers the history of precision, from the tolerances in tenths of an inch for the first steam engines, to the atomic for microprocessors. It's a very enjoyable book to listen to and be inspired by the engineers that came before us, and how every level of precision to achieve a task inspired a need for more precision. Once you have better tools, you want to make better things which need even better tools. I wish the book had gone into even more detail at times, and clearly the author has a preference for mechanical engineering over other forms of engineering, but I'd recommend this book to any aspiring engineer. ( )
An elegant, exuberant, well researched book about a topic I would never have thought I would find fascinating. The development of the topic from chapter to chapter is logical and always surprising, and the concluding chapter on the desirable persistence of imperfection was unusually good for such conclusions. The afterword on measurement, while certainly informative, struck me as unnecessary. ( )
“The Perfectionists” succeeds resoundingly in making us think more deeply about the everyday objects we take for granted. It challenges us to reflect on our progress as humans and what has made it possible. It is interesting, informative, exciting and emotional, and for anyone with even some curiosity about what makes the machines of our world work as well as they do, it’s a real treat.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
These brief passages from works by the writer Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) might usefully be borne in mind while reading the pages that follow.
The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
- THE CULTURE OF CITIES (1938)
We must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent.
- VALUES FOR SURVIVAL (1946)
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
- MY WORKS AND DAYS (1979)
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Setsuko
And in loving memory of my father,
Bernard Austin William Winchester, 1921-2011,
a most meticulous man
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
PROLOGUE
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
- Bertolt Brecht, LIFE OF GALILEO (1939)
We were just about to sit down to dinner when my father, a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, said that he had something to show me.
CHAPTER 1: STARS, SECONDS, CYLINDERS, AND STEAM
It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.
- Aristotle (384-322 BC), NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
The man who by the common consent of the engineering fraternity is regarded as the father of true precision was an eighteenth-century Englishman named John Wilkinson, who was denounced sardonically as lovably mad, and especially so because of his passion for and obsession with metallic iron.
Citas
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The duration by which, fundamentally, we measure everything that we make and use, and which in turn helps establish for us with unfailing exactitude the precision that allows the modern world to function.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Published in North America as The perfectionists; published in the UK and the Commonwealth as Exactly.
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico
▾Referencias
Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.
Wikipedia en inglés
Ninguno
▾Descripciones del libro
"Un tour por las maravillas tecnolgicas del mundo, desde la revolucin industrial hasta la actualidad. La perfeccin no existe, pero quienes se empearon en alcanzarla han tenido ms importancia en nuestra vida cotidiana de lo que pensamos. Este es un tourpor las maravillas tecnolgicas, desde la revolucin industrial hasta la actualidad. Hace comprensible por qu funcionan inventos como el avin, la lente de una cmara, las mquinas de rayos X, el telescopio Hubble, el friegaplatos, el microchip, el smartphone, y tambin por qu pueden fallar.Simon Winchester es un maestro de la narracin, y todas las personas, lugares y eventos sobre los que escribe apasionadamente cobran vida con exquisito detalle, public el New York Journal of Books. A pesar de ser un popular escritor, hasta ahora era desconocido en espaol.Considerado por la Royal Society britnica uno de los mejores libros cientficos de 2018 y por The Wall Street Journal un cuento extraordinario y propulsor, este ensayo nos deslumbra con la historia de la ingeniera a travs de curiosas ancdotas." -- contracoberta
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5
I don’t think this book is perfect, but it’s pretty well written and provides a cohesive narrative of how we, as humans, have sought and achieved more and more ridiculous levels of replicable precision and how even small imperfections can cause catastrophic damage with the tolerance high performance products are designed for. It’s not at the top of my list, but it’s a pretty good read and you’ll learn a little. (