Joan Mackenzie reviews Exactly by Simon Winchester

Hello I’m Joan and this book is called Exactly by Simon Winchester. Now I'm a huge fan of engineers because I think they are some of the smartest people around and the work that they do sometimes is just pure genius. And this book is a history of some of those people and the things that they did. It is a history, in fact, of precision engineering. So it goes from the first boring out of the barrel of a gun, all the way through the development of the first jet engine through to the motorcar, the history of the car. The development in particular of the Rolls Royce which is a fascinating chapter, not least because they tell that story about how they put a martini, a full martini, on the radiator cap and then wound the power up to 60 miles an hour and they say that it didn't even slosh across the sides. Then it goes through to the Hubble space telescope which is an absolutely fascinating chapter about how the first time they put it up it failed. They had to work out what they had done wrong. And it's just unbelievable the lengths they went to and the brains that they pulled together to fix it. And then it finishes up with the history of the computer chip and the Intel company who, of course, have produced trillions of them over the years and then looks forward to the next evolution of what might come. So if you have any interest at all in great quality non fiction, in the history of engineering, in anything to do with precision and materials and smart, smart people then read this book.