For at least the last seven centuries the decorative brass faceplate of an astrolabe has been known as a “rete.” The word came into the English language from the Latin for “network,” and in this lexical sense it very much works, since the face of many an old astrolabe looks much like a metallic net which has been cast over the more solid wheels and gears that make up this most ancient of astronomical instruments.
The word is also employed nowadays on the internet. It denotes a mail-list, a perpetual cyber-conversation run from the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and which connects in an immense electronic network a worldwide group of people who are fascinated by the intersecting topics of measurement, scientific devices (astrolabes and orreries included, of course), as well as optics, cypher machines, and the dueling concepts of accuracy and precision. I joined this list back in 2016, doing so with a timid query to the effect that I was wanting to write a history of precision, and did anyone out there have any ideas?
Zounds! I was promptly flooded by a crashing wave of enthusiasm from all around the planet, from Potsdam to Padua, Puerto Rico to Pakistan, with legions of scientifically minded people offering me advice and sending me books, giving me links to academic papers, invitations to conferences and, by the score, the names of leading figures in the world of exactitudinal studies.
And so my first order of business is to thank the originators and organizers of the rete mail-list, and to honor the helpful multitudes of those who like to be known as “retians,” for getting me started. A goodly number of the names that follow were aficionados whom I first encountered through rete@maillist.ox.ac.uk, and all were eager to be helpful in ways both great and small. Among them were:
Silke Ackermann, Chuck Alicandro, Paul Bertorelli, Harish Bhaskaran, John Briggs, Stuart Davidson, Michael dePodesta, Cheri Dragos-Pritchard, Bart Fried, Melissa Grafe, Siegfried Hecker, Ben Hughes, David Keller, John Lavieri, Andrew Lewis, Mark McEachern, Rory McEvoy, Graham Machin, Diana Muir, David Pantalony, Lindsey Pappas, Ian Robinson, David Rooney, Christoph Roser, Brigitte Ruthman, James Salsbury, Douglas So, Peter Sokolowski, Konrad Steffen, Martin Storey, William Tobin, James Utterback, Dan Veal, Scott Walker.
Many of these, and hosts of others, swiftly insisted after my first inquiry that I make contact with the two leading experts in the field of precision, Pat McKeown of Cranfield University in southern England, and Chris Evans of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I traveled to see both, and each proved a fountain of assistance and generosity. This book could hardly have been written without their help and encouragement, and my debt to both is considerable. Any errors or infelicities are, of course, mine alone.
During my research I visited the national metrology institutes in Britain, Japan, China, and the United States, and so wish to record my particular thanks to Paul Shore, Laura Childs, and Sam Gresham at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington; to Gail Porter, Chris Oates, and Joseph Tan at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg; to Kelly Yan at the Changping campus of the National Institute of Metrology in Beijing; and to Toshiaki Asakai and Kazuhiro Shimaoka at the National Metrology Institute of Japan in Tsukuba, as well as offer my gratitude for the valuable advice of Professor Masanori Kunieda at the University of Tokyo.
NASA scientists and other colleagues involved in both the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes were most helpful, including Mark Clampin and Lee Feinberg at the Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as Eric Chaisson at Harvard and Matt Mountain at AURA.
I wish also to give particular thanks to Richard Wray, Chloe Walters, and Bill O’Sullivan at Rolls-Royce in Derby; to Billi Carey of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Society; to Mark Johnson, Andrew Nahum, Ben Russell, Jim Bennett, and Jenni Fewery at the Science Museum, London; to Jelm Franse at ASML in Eindhoven (as well as to my old friend Toni Tack for offering me hospitality and shelter while in the Netherlands during this expedition); to John Grotzinger and Ed Stolper at Caltech; to Steve Hindle at the Huntington Library in Pasadena (where I was briefly a scholar-in-very-comfortable-residence); to Richard Ovendon, who is Bodley’s Librarian (and occupant of what must be one of the world’s nicest offices) in Oxford; to Fred Raab and Michael Landry at LIGO, Hanford; to Jessica Brown of Northrop Grumman; to Keiko Naruse and Takashi Ueda of Seiko; to Stefan Daniel of Leica—and my old newspaper colleague Chris Angeloglou, a formidable Leica collector.
Stephen Wolfram and his colleague Amy Young, both immensely knowledgeable about precise measurement, provided wise counsel (and in Amy’s case, a gift of Christmas cookies). Jeremy Bernstein, expert on all things nuclear, told me much about plutonium. Max Whitby, a friend of forty years, offered fascinating insights into the world of nanotechnology. And the Master of my old Oxford college, Roger Ainsworth, turned out to have been a lead member of the Rolls-Royce Blade Cooling Research Group, and offered valuable reminiscences. Ann Lawless of the American Precision Museum, in Windsor, Vermont, was a supporter of this book from its inception. The writer Witold Rybczynski and the filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn also expressed interest and encouragement, for which I am most grateful.
My son, Rupert Winchester, an always keen and close reader, provided invaluable commentary on the near-finished script, as he has for nearly all of my books.
I cannot speak too highly, nor too warmly, of my new editor at HarperCollins, Sara Nelson, who brought her years of expertise to bear on the initial manuscript and turned it into a finished document of which I am now cautiously proud. It has been the greatest pleasure to work with her, and we have achieved a rapport, I believe, which will now endure for many years to come. Her assistant Daniel Vazquez, succeeded in the closing weeks of this book’s birth-canal progress by Mary Gaule, both proved more than worthy of Sara’s confidence in them, and proved a delight to work with. Likewise, across in London, my HarperCollins editor, Arabella Pike: we are new to each other—but the fact that she bought for her young son a set of Jo blocks as a Christmas gift, and after reading about them in these pages, suggests that a long and happy friendship is in the making.
My thanks as always to my agents at William Morris Endeavor, Suzanne Gluck in New York and Simon Trewin in London, as well as to Andrea Blatt, Suzanne’s assistant. Your tenacity and persistence are deservedly the stuff of legend, and as a beneficiary I am hugely grateful. For that, of course, but on a higher level for your friendship too, and which I know will long endure.
And finally, to my wife, Setsuko, both for offering her highly original insights into the fugitive relationship between precision and craft—most especially in Japan—and for her overall enthusiastic support for this book. My gratitude to her is boundless.
Simon Winchester
Sandisfield, Massachusetts
March 2018