middle schoolers and you cannot hear a pin drop. that iss the next generation of readers to create the next generation that the miami book fair lives for another 35 years. >>. t good morning i would like to welcome you to miami book fair the 35th edition. i am so proud to serve as a

volunteer for 29 years and loving every minute of it thank you so much. miami-dade is so proud to host miami book fair here serving 165,000 people and talking about students and faculty and staff and with those volunteers thate make it happen each and every year. to recognize those youngsters from the school system in the area institutions as well as others in the community who also volunteer their time to make sure it is as special every year in miami book fair is year-round so thanks to the

circle of friends i know you again or in the audience today but to the sponsors the bachelor foundation north america and so many other that give up their support for the year-round miami book fair and the street fair that they all take place in a very special way. so let me ask you to turn off your devices and enjoy the program there will be a question andou answer period so step to the middle of the room where there is a podium. one question only to get all of the questions and i am so proud to serve miami book fair

at the miami-dade college we respect each and every one no matter what. on that note the program we are about to enjoy i would like to ask simon winchester to come up on stage welcome. [applause] . >> so asking in conversation simon is the acclaimed author of many books including the professor and the madman the man who changed the world and love china and so many other

"new york times" bestsellers. and the engineers to create a modernnt world "the new york world best-selling chases technology from the industrial age to the digital age to explore that single component. in conversation today with an author in her own right a pulitzer prize finalist for the birth of america with the george washington book price among many other accolades please join me to welcome both. [applause]

. >> thank you all for coming if you were here for the last session this is the anecdote to all of that like the florida ballot. [laughter] we will talk about precision. so you also happen to have a different precise origin so why writers love to hear from their readers just to make sure he's not in the audience you lives in clearwater and a scientific to make very

intricate pieces of glassware in the laboratories and he writes me one day to say there were books would you be interested in doing a book on the history of this thing that envelopes all of our lives that is not a bad idea my father was a precision engineer. so to be a little skeptical to produce the narrative flow for the subject. >> think of the jacket design? . >> with different jackets but

in britain the original title is called in factly. >> 2599. [laughter] but the marketing people in new york said it's very difficult whose title is a concept. >> like a longitude ff they said can you think about putting human beings into the title? so it goes into the internal e-mail at harper with perfectionist and they said we a perfectionist. nitpicking and fs budgets why would you want to read a book about that? . >> so now is talkfect about

precision because you probably need to define the term for accuracy and as you point out in your pages sometimes they dgo together beautifully or they don't work all that well together. >> precision and accuracy as you know, there are no synonyms in those two things are very different the best way to describe it is your intentionea and if you do you have achieved great accuracy to achieve something as close as possible but precision is very different if you hit at

10:00 with your arrow and again and again you have achieved great precision precisionth and accuracy is perfect but precision is the same thing over and over again and that is crucial in engineering because that manufactures into interchangeable parts. that is getting ahead of myself but so that should be borne so what you know, what i mean. >> so you give us a date of birth? . >> in fact, i would be fascinated to know maybe young

people would know this but precision may 4th, 1776 i did not realize it has a greater but relevant significance w. yes it is "star wars" day. [laughter] who said that? so anyway may the fourth be with you so that is ironic it all begins. [laughter] so you take that musket so there was no such thing. and to talk about component

parts that is the infamous demonstration with the 18th century. with those ten principal components with the trigger and in a battle that everything is handmade. and that took time to take you out of left field and to make that interchangeable and that would fit in that changes the

field of battle with the world of engineering so to do this to this individual parts in boxes and then they invite them to come to a demonstration to assemble theseou pieces but the crucially important aspect is that jefferson saw this and god it is part of the brilliance and he wrote immediately to washington and said i have just seen this amazing demonstration we should incorporate this manufacturing techniqueon into guns in

america. so more crucially the one in harpers ferry virginia but making that into interchangeable parts at that time for those who put up the hands to see that bankrupt and eli whitney from the cotton gin, when you say i can do it it is a demonstration that like the part is interchangeable but these rather simple fellows and they say you appear to have done it you have a contract so to the

engineering community that is a heroic figure but to the engineering a community someone whose reputation is completely besmirched. so i thought i would get a lot of blowback. [laughter] . >> i wonder if they would it have dinner parties where you assemble a guide. [laughter] so think about so many things we take for granted so just to talk about standardization the way that it works. >> yes so to that .1 screw

would not fit another but then with that angle of the screw which is s still used today. and then the british standard and then the legacy so many of these people but who remembers henry? . >> if you had all of these oddballs if you have a favorite? he invented the fountain pen

and also a machine to make grills in large number. and in the pump so they don't have to go down to the seller and then he invented the flushable toilet. [applause] . >> at least today clap for that and not the beer tap. [laughter] so all hail. with that beautiful exquisite cylinder because the industrial revolution for those rural people by hedges

and fences does the revolution begin? andlt suddenly wealthy people lsare in the cities close to their factories and with those that are not wealthy and if their house could be broken into. but then protected their doors with locks and those most sophisticated for those in his showroom west of piccadilly with a cushion with the most

beautiful lock without destroying it i would pay 200 guineas. w so they would come in but 1810 he died the company that still exists today continues to exhibit through 1851 with that great exhibition of hyde park in london and was with the industrial revolution and then in america and i also know so

armed with a variety of specialized tools he works 51 hours so now you have met the challenge so here is your 200 guinea. and the demand from the back of the crowd says i can pick the lock so step forward using a tiny sliver of wood in 15 minutest later it opened. his name was yale.

[laughter]en . >> so that you have taken us through mid century britain with industrialization and changing the landscape with the progres progress, so why london? and what are these essential differences are there comparisons and the automated wind we find ourselves today? remake that's an interesting question. their interventions were based on nothing with a flash of inspiration so the way that

things were developed and to see anything like it before but as the unsung hero who was involved. very few people remember him today that he was persecuted for the idea of industrial production to say this had tremendously important ramifications in the beginning of the 19th century because the royal navy would ship to pull up the anchor it was with ropes and wheels with give you great mechanicall advantage and

you could move something that would weigh many times. they were made by hand the navy needed 150,000 per year so he went to the navy and said to turn the elm tree into a pulley block how many steps does that take? to cut the tree into chunks and smooth into the shape to shampoo and bore the holes, 43. he said i will make 43 machines each one will do one part of the manufacturer and they gave him a factory in portsmouth and he built the machines and sure enough he would feed the trees into a

hopper and come out the other end fully fashioned pulley blocks now overnight all of these carpenters lost their jobs the only people they trained were ten unskilled workers to make sure they work to the machines. but they worked so well they were still producing rocks in 1965 not a single one needed to be replaced yet in over 200 years. that was the first true factory in the world nowhere e,near the social consequences but because it came out of nowhere everybody was amazed

so victorian era manufacturing is still restorative but and they seem to be advances which was profound in the way it change the world. >> so i have to accept the updates on myy phone today? [laughter] . >> i ignored it. but one of the great triumphs is your ability to narrate two contradictory stories at the same time so taking precision into different directions for the few versus the many as we watch the ford motor cars come off. so first talk about henry ward royce and how it should be

called the police roles properly and i should say one of the many reasons to buy this book you will hear him report that it is a perfectly reasonable investment. [laughter] there are two henry's both born 1863 and they are both captivated in their youth by the idea of mechanically propelled vehicles and with that original integration and with those crider cycles with a 10-horsepower which propelled these two characters alone but both men thought

this was wonderful that they each have a differentoy view but they said i will create the most impeccably engineered vehicle that i can. henry ford by contrast said we live in an amazing country. i will make a machine that everyone in the country can afford to buy so they both made almost exactly the same through 1927 that was made in northern england and the ford model t.

probably the finest machine never made mechanically and they are still running today it is a very very good investment. [laughter] but the ford model t produced 16 million of them but the crucial difference is where precision comes in if you think of a rolls-royce it is precision but it wasn't so if a part did not fit properly the engineer would simply take a file until it did fit but in dearborn michigan the production lines ford created all the parts whether for a carburetor or breaks or transmission if for some

reason they were not interchangeable then the production line would grind to a halt while somebody worked on what happened and money is lost in the line interrupted so precision wasn't key to make it cheaply but not a key as an exercise of full-scale production for craftsmanship. it was a dichotomy of the craft with british engineering and that was the beginning of the last century. >> so as he labors away at the

mechanics would anyone sell them? and after several years they came up and could not believe the car could be so quiet quite bitterly to put brimful martini glass on the radiator and excel the car and not even a trace of vibration. is that i will buy your car only under the condition that my name comes before yours as the engineer so today when the rolls-royce leaves the factory. as you know, it has gone

bankrupt and is owned by volkswagen. [laughter] that to engineers when they say goodbye to a car they still call them a royce. be sure not to use the word roles because they will shudder with contempt. [laughter] . . . .

. >> precision on the other hand of electronic precision. the story you're talking about if you can imagine it is a fully laden double-decker a380 airbus leaving singapore for sydney in november of i think 2010, four rolls-royce air engines, 900-most powerful engines on the planet. full and they have to -- i don't know if many of you have come out of singapore. if you're heading south you have to leave air space very quickly. so it's going up at a severe angle with all the engines spooled up to mayor maximum power, suddenly the inboard portsideow engine explodes and shrapnel is sent all over the place, not into the imaginary cabin, shatters the wing that happened to be five pilots on board and they wrestle this stricken aeroplane and they get it done back to singapore

airport and everything's okay. but the analysis of what happened. there was a pipe five centimeters long, about the diameter of a drinking straw. awhich has been manufacturedane facility in england about a year before. and mismachined by a hundredth of a millimeter. it was put into the plane, the plane on this particular sequence of flights took off from los angeles, short runway, the tube was somewhat stressed. it was called an oil feed stump pipe and it sent oil into one of the bearings in the very middle of the jet. it landed in london. took off from london and went to singapore. the pipe wasn't at all stressed, took off from singapore. under the situation i've described, and the stress was so almighty it fractured in this slightly too thin part oil cascaded all over the interior of the plane. immediately flashed into fire f

melted the titanium of the wheel and it threw all the rotor bloodies which acted as pieces of shrapnel. are we beginning to machine things to tollerances which are too tiny, because we're under pressure to build bigger air plains to take more passengers, ever part and part. faster and faster. similarly in the electronic world h my iphone is outside, but an iphone like the one you're trying to update yesterday. >> i wasn't trying to update it -- >> well decided not to. has a chip the size of my pifngy fingernail, has 4 had and a stquarter billion transistors in them. i think the most chig statistic i came in from intel they said there are more transistors

working in the world today than there are leaves on all the trees in all the world. i drive up and down the mass pike and look at all the trees and i think there is an incallculable number of leaves you cannot possibly have more transistors not on the mass pike, but all over the world. well there are. 13 million beal made today. they're operating in such tiny spaces they're license plate at an atomic level, where if you're heisenberg things start misbehow oftenning in mysterious fashion. >> stacy: so you're anticipating the rule of moore's law. >> simon: this is the business about computer power will double every year or two years. everything more but memory. >> stacy: everything gets faster and smaller, right.

>> simon: and cheaper. and they insignificant although it looks as if we are with the new generation of optical compute and quantum compute we can go on and on, well i'm not so certain that we can and should. but that's a whole new argument, and i -- i'm philosophical if that doesn't sound too pretentious. i started to wonder whether we're get associates precision too much and forgetting that life is a craftmanship and the imprecise, the human scale kind of thing. and so, i think that's an important thing to take o stock of. everything is going in such a world wind of progress but yet where is it getting us? chef you do that beautifully had when you talk about going to japan, a culture that prioritizes both. and the factor where you have

hand watches turned out at 120 a week, and the robotic assembly line turns out 25,000 a day. smin 20,000 quarters quartz watches, because they created the movement, and gave to do everyone in the world which is the reason for the collapse of the swiss mechanical watch industry. seiko has a production floor in mayorioca, producing 20,000 quartz watches every day. in the same floor there are a set of25 double doors, and there aree craftsman and women, and each one producing mechanical watches with things that we forgotten, like hair springs, and jeweled movements, producing about a 10 a day. they revere craftmanship in the

handmade. i have to say in my own house in massachusetts, we have eight mechanical cloks and a barograph which i wind every sunday morning. i'll miss tomorrow and it vexes me. i will do it tomorrow night. i wind them all, and at 8:00 on a sunday morning all eight clocks are in rate. tuesday they're starting to fall out of rate. [laughter] wednesday, thursday, they're complete horlogical shambles. but that just reminds me of that lovely line from dorothy l sayers novel "gaudy night" about walking to the streets of oxford and listening to the college cloks as she says "in friendly disagreement." i love that idea and i prefer the world where there is utter precision and friendly disagreement. >> stacy: you bring me to the

last question, i can't help but ask you, your strong in trade is so muchst clarity on the page so here o you are writing a book with a title which is exactly or the perfectionist, or has precision in the title. clarity is your speciality, did you feel you had to bring this to a new standard, was there additional pressure on you in some way? >> simon: i knew this would happen, i have never had a book where more readers have pointed out mercifully infelicities, so when i sent the messages to the publishers i don't say here is a list of 170 corrections. i say, 175 improvements. [laughter] >> stacy: because it's in the terminology. there's a microphone in the middle if there. are questions from the audience. in the meantime we all use gps every day, and i had no idea how gps really works r worked, so do

you want to speak quickly before your first question about the eastern -- about the two cloks in eastern. >> simon: well, eastern who invented -- there are two rivalling "inventors" of gps. the way it's done now effectivelyo they have foridday accurate cloks and the 32 satellites that makes up the u.s.'s elgps devices, and the time the satellite takes to go from earth to the satellites gives your position on earth astonishing accuracy. i used to run -- i used to be a geologist and used to have a job positioning oil rigs in the north sea. and using a very primitive form of radio, direction finding, i could put the rig down in the north sea to within an accuracy of about 200 meters.

nowadays, i went to japanese research ship which using gps, and and the american system is the best in the world they can locate them on the ocean and you know what a wilderness the ocean is to within half a centimeter. and that to me is quite extraordinary, and it's all run from an air base in colorado, shrieve air base, no one ever talks about it, no one knows about it. there are competing gps systems the chinese and the europeans and russians are coming up with galileo. but for now the gps in the u.s. is the best and free. 21st century technology but it is made us forget the joy of maps. i'm going back to the whole business about friendly disagreement cloks. i also collect and love maps and i want us to bible to use them,

take them out of the glove compartment, study them, rather hethan simply saying -- now take us there. i rant a lot in this book. [laughter] >> stacy: then someone has to refold the map. >> simon: yes. that's true. >> guest: something along the hlines of serial production you're talking about manufacturing in serial production where everything is identical. something you mentioned rules, an interesting highlight of rules is that 1909, the short brothers formerly of rue chester, later of belfast, northern ireland, the three brothers started an aircraft company, signed a licensing agreement with the two wright brothers, and proceeded to build 6 wright flyer b's in series. the first serial production of

powered aircraft anywhere in thi world. the purchaser of the sixth aircraft was mr. rolls, and he proceeded to kill himself learning to fly it. [laughter] >> simon: and i might say my first real reporting assignment was in belfast in the 1960s, and short brothers made these particular type of aircraft rather stubby looking, people-carrier and the wings for that aircraft were made in har gsbeen in northern china. and you would see the wings would come on the transiberian railway, to moscow, to amsterdam, to hairch to british aisles to liverpool, put on another fairy to belfast, which i thought was delightful insanity.

>> guest: -- >> simon: i hope what i said was true and you're not going to write a letter saying there were 176 improvements. sir? >> guest: besides avoiding take-off from singapore. what would you say what week -- you mentioned that this stress of taking off in a short -- in airspace in singapore might create issues for some airplanes because of the precision of the parts. so besides that, what other practicalpr advice for daily lie do you have that we can take away from your book? >> simon: practical, rather than not taking airplanes. i think one has to have faith in the precision, and the things are going to work every day. our motor cars and our coffee makers and so forth. you have to assume that they're properly made but when they do break down, and perhaps the

reason is an imprecise part then lower your -- not lower your guard but be aware that precision is not an infallible thing. it's something we should take for granted maybe, but also have some caution which goes back to my point about not fetishizing it, so be thankful for it and be cautious. and make things by hand yourself. i love the fact that in ceo korea and japan, and china. elderly people make things by hand and make them beautifully are awarded the title of living national treasure. and are give pensions by the government and reverence by the people. i would like countries that revere precision and precision essentially only, the united states, britain, germany, most notably to say well wait a minute, let us also give our

respect to people who make the imprecise and who make things by hand. so i would love the japanese and the korean systemm to come here as well. [applause] >> guest: i wanted to know if in your during your research, do you find any notable stories of industrial espionage or where technology would be stolen. i know when people think of that they think about the second world war but do you find any notorious trends, especially more recent than the second world war? >> simon: let me tell you a short story. i live in western massachusetts, and the river that courses down from my village, the farmington river is a valley which leads to long island sound and it was where -- it was the brass valley where brass buttons for coats were made, where brass

cartridges for guns were made, and there's a lot of -- at least there was in the 20th century a lot of metallic manufacturing, and there was a company in toringten, which is a town maybe half an hour from where i love, and the company was called hendi and company, and just before the outbreak on the second world war they did a lot of business with a company in frankfurt, mechanical engineering company and they decided to have a contest to see who could make the most precise little thing. and the people in torrington worked long and hard and produced a steel rod, about a 16th of an inch in diameter. perfectly straight, beautifully paullingished, unvarying in its surface. they put it in tissue paper, in a wooden box, sent it across to germany. then, just before the war broke

out, the germans responded. by sending back a box, which the people in torrington opened and found in the tissue paper an identical steel rod, same inlength, same diameter, same brilliant polishing same straightness, and they thought t they copied us and they noticed horror there had been a hole bored down the center of the tube. they were aghast, how could that be possible that could be done? and then a war broke out and all correspondence between torrington and germany broke down, until 1945, both countries served the war. the two boss said had lunch together and ruefully the american said, i still can't get over how you bored that hole in thats steel rod that you made o brilliantly. we were embarrassed, it was

horrible. and the german said well that's the reason i've come to see you because in fact we cheated. we drew the hole first of all in a block of steal and then machined around it, which was perfectly easy thing to do. so i've come here to say what you did was the most perfect thing and we simple simply cheated can, he said which is why we lost the war. [laughter] >> stacy: so on that note i'd like to ask for a round of applause and thanks. [applause] simon winchester and stacy shiff. thank you so much and as you know autographing will be take place on this floor past the elevator on the north side of the floor and if you have a ticket for the next program, you may remain in the room. if you don't we ask that