Hacker News Books

I've recently finished 2 books that helped give a nice macro level to human's "progress".

'Sapiens' & 'The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World'

Stuff You Should Know (podcast) has also been a gem for learning broadly about industrial and material topics.

Edit: Oops - somehow missed the other post mentioning this book. Sorry!

These are covered with a charming personal story by Simon Winchester in his book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

It's reviewed here:
https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-perfectionists-how-pre...

and the audiobook as pretty good too.

If you're interested in how gauge blocks fit into the history of precision engineering, a new book called "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" puts them into context, and presents a very interesting perspective on the events and developments that brought us into modernity. These blocks feature strongly into the industrial revolution. I strongly recommend the book!

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0062652575

If you are interested in the history of precision engineering. I can highly recommend the book titled "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World".[1]

It does into detail on how precision manufacturing was created from the beginnings of the industrial revolution until today. The book has some funny anocdotes from history, and despite being quite long i found it easy to read.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...

Tangentially related to this article is Simon Winchester's latest book "The perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World".

One of the chapters in this book is about the differences between the hand-built cars of Rolls Royce (and their origin story which I never knew) and Henry Ford's production line that required interchangeable precision parts.

> Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?

For a cultural history of precision see The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvOEcyYsiHc

I didn't know about the Whitworth 3 plates method and enjoyed reading about it a lot. It answers a question that's been on my mind since I was a child. Thank you for posting.

Simon Winchester wrote an enjoyable book about the history of precision that starts with Wilkinson’s boring of steam cylinders to improve upon the efficiency of the first steam engines and rifles, through engineering history to ASML’s nano-level IC fab machines.

In America, it's called The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Elsewhere, the title of the same book is Exactly.

https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Cr...

The technologies developed in ancient China are staggering, the more so as they'd been largely fogotten by / rendered invisible to the Chinese themselves.

A find of the past few years has been Joseph Needham's truly epic Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, still in production -- the series is not yet completed, 7 volumes, 27 books. Simon Winchester (also author of The Perfectionists, mentioned in this thread, has an excellent biography, The Man Who Loved China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...