![]() ![]() It had already revolutionized cannon manufacture, and it did the same for Watt’s steam engine. ![]() After years of frustration, he was rescued by Wilkinson, who had invented a machine that bored a precise hole through a solid block of iron. ![]() Watt’s pistons generated enormous energy but moved inside handmade sheet metal cylinders that leaked profusely under the pressure. 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.Įarly on in this entertaining narrative, bestselling journalist and historian Winchester ( Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators and Fading Empires, 2015), whose father “was for all of his working life a precision engineer,” points out that James Watt (1736-1819) invented a vastly improved steam engine, but John Wilkinson (1728-1808) made it work. ![]()
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