that it can do for me. so for me, this is the right job for me. >> justice sotomayor, we're out of time and we're getting the wrap signal from these fell last over here. they want us to go away? >> they want us to go away. we've literally got hundreds much questions for you in a three-day span. we want to thank the teachers and students for sending these in. anytime you're back in d.c. and you want to answer more we'd love to talk to you again. >> i'd be delighted. >> "my beloved world" "the beloved world of sonia sotomay sotomayor" and she has a younger book. i'll show you that now. thank you for our coverage here at miami book fair. >> thank you. [applaus [applause] >> you're watching book tv. the miami book fair continues now.

now. >> [inaudible conversations] good morning again and please take your seats. we are about to begin. thank you so much. good morning again. i'd like to welcome you to miami book fair. the 35th edition. i'm so proud to have served as a volunteer for 29 years and loving every minute of it. so thank you so much. [applause] >> miami-dade college is so proud to host miami book fair here at our college that serves over 165,000 students. and talking about, you know,

students, faculty and staff. those are among the hundreds of volunteers that make miami book fair happen each and every year. in addition to that, i'd like to recognize the many youngsters from our school system, from our area institutions, as well as others in the community who also volunteer their time to make sure that this book fair is as special as it is every single year. and as you know, miami book fair is actually year round. so many facts, particularly miami book fair's circle of friends. i know many of you are again in the audience here today, to the sponsors, the knight foundation, to the group foundation, the bachelor foundation, ohl north america, and so many other key sponsors that give of their support to

make sure our year-round miami book fair and our evenings with and the street fair all take place in a very, very special way. and so, without further ado, let me ask you to turn off your devices as always so we can all enjoy the program, and there will be a question and answer period. i ask at that time that you step to the middle of the room where there is a podium. one question only, please, so we can get all the questions in. again request-- again, i'm so proud to have served the miami book fair at miami-dade college and we respect each and everyone no matter what. and so, on that note, the program that we're about to enjoy, i'd like to ask simon

winchester and also stacy schiff to come on stage. let's welcome them. [applaus [applause]. >> and so we have simon winchester in conversation with stacy schiff. and as you know, simon winchester is the acclaimed author of many, many books, including the professor and the madman. the men who united the state. the map that changed the world. man who loved china and so, yes, and so many other new york times best sellers. in the perfectionist, which he will speak about today, perfectionists help precision engineers create the modern world. the revered new york times best selling author, mr. winchester, traces the development of

technology from the industrial age to the digital age, to explore the single component crucial to advancement. he's in conversation today with stacy shift, author in her own right. winner of a pulitzer prize. and pulitzer prize finalist as well. and the birth of america. she's also the winner of the george washington book prize among many, many other accolades. today, again, join me in welcoming miss schiff and mr. winchester. thank you. [applaus [applause] >> thank you all for coming. good morning, simon. >> good morning. >> for those of you who were here for the last session, this session is designed as an antidote to the messiness and muddiness. this is about perfection, like the florida ballot. [laughter]

>> going to talk about precision here. and simon, you begin the book with an indelible childhood memory, but the book has a precise origin in florida. so i thought it seemed appropriate that we start there. and why writers like to hear from their readers. >> this is a chapter i never heard of before. just to make sure that he's not in the audience, he said he couldn't be, colin posy. i can talk about him freely. he lives in clearwater on the other side of the state. and he's a scientific blast blower and makes precise glass for work in laboratorielaborato and he said i read your books and i liked them, obviously very nice and wondered if you'd be interested in doing a book

on the history of precision, this thing that's envelopes all of our lives, but which is invisible and inchoate and indescribable. and i thought, not a bad idea. my father was a precision engineer. i'd never thought about it. and my editor at first was a little skeptical, wondering how you could sort of produce a narrative flow to the subject. >> think of a jacket design, how would you illustrate this one? >> and indeed a title. both the united states and britain, different titles, different jackets. the title in-- i hope-- sitting here, in britain the title is the original title which is the word "exactly", so you should buy two companies. >> 25.99. but, the marketing people at harper in new york said, it's

very difficult to sell or market a book whose title is a concept. i thought-- >> like longitude. didn't sell any copies. >> no copies at all. >> they said can you not think of putting human beings into the title so in the end i came up with the perfectionists, and it went onto the internal e-mail in harper and within about ten minutes people were saying, but we hate perfectionists. knit-picking, pedantic, fuss-budgets. and it's done reasonably well. >> let's move away from the other word for perfection, precision. you need to define the word. there's precision and there's accuracy. as you point out in your pages, sometimes they go together beautifully like when it comes to a gun and sometimes they don't work that well together, like with my watch and with my clocks, right? >> right. >> so do you want to speak to

that and talk about how you tell time? >> well, precision and accuracy, i mean, the two words are used more or less interchangeably, but as you know in the english language there are no synonyms, and effectively. and the best way to think of them is like a dart board. your intention is to hit the bull and if you do, you have achieved great accuracy because the definition of accuracy is achieving something as close as possible to your intention. precision is very different. if you fire your dart, arrow or gun at the target and hit at 10:00 in one of the outer rings and hit it again and again and again and again, you have achieved great precision. accuracy, if you achieve precision and accuracy and precision, that's perfect. but precision is doing the same thing over and over and over

again and crucial in engineering because the manufacturer of interchangeable parts, that the parts are all exactly the same, so all of them will fit. and i'm sort of getting ahead of myself, but that precision and accuracy, those two definitions should sort of be born in the back of your mind even though lazily, and to put that-- to an engineer-- >> give us a date of birth of precision, before the birth of america, in fact. >> i'd be fascinated to know in the audience. i think mainly young people will know this. that precision has an actual birthday and it's may the 4th, 1776, two months exactly before had this country was born. but, i didn't realize that that date, the 4th of may has a

greater relevant significance. does anyone know what the 4th of may is. >> yes, "star wars" day. [laughter] >> who said that? was that a young person? well, anyway, may the 4th be with you. [laughter] >> it's droll and ironic that this all began. >> i'm thinking how shall we celebrate? but now we have the answer. and before the parts, you threw your musket away, like the television today. there were no component parts. probably we should go back to talk about component parts and the-- >> that was the famous or infamous demonstration in the closing years of the 18th century, when a man in france, henry blanc, took apart the ten principal components of a flintlock, a gun, and the thing

was named, the frizzle, the pan, the trigger, the striker. and in a battle 1780, if you broke your trigger or the flintlock wouldn't work, probably, because everything was handmade, you'd have to take it back to the armorer, and get a new gun or a new gun made for you, which took time and took you out of the battlefield. blanc realized if you made all the parts interchangeable such that if you broke the trigger, you simply had to reach into a box and get another trigger and it would fit because everything was interchangeable, then that would change the field of battle and he didn't quite appreciate this, the world of engineering at the stroke. and he did this, he produced all the parts of a flintlock and put the individual parts in boxes and fixed them all up and invited a group of great and good in paris at the time to

come to a demonstration and said, you know, pick every trigger and assembly out of these ten pieces a flintlock which people found they could do in a matter of seconds. the crucially important person at that demonstration was the then american minister of -- in france at the time and that was thomas jefferson. jefferson saw this and got it, an indication of jefferson's brilliance as a scientist and he wrote immediately to washington and said, i've just seen this amazing demonstration, we should, in my view, incorporate this kind of manufacturing technique into the making of guns in america. so, a competition was staged, there were two armories at the time, one in springfield, massachusetts, but more crucially, the one in harpers ferry, virginia, and who can make interchangeable parts for the kind of gun which we are using in america at the time and we need about 10,000 of them right away and one person who put up his hand mainly

because he had gone bankrupt and needed the money, was the fellow from the cotton gin. >> eli whitney? >> was going to say whitney. he said i can do it. >> fine, he went away and produced a clutch of guns which looked as if the parts were interchangeable, but were not. he cheated. he pulled a con on the simple fellows on the committee who had come from washington. well, mr. whitney you appeared you've done it you've got the contract. so he won the contract and made the guns and none of them worked properly. it was so-- to the engineering community popular imagination has whitney as a heroic figure because of the cotton gin which he didn't patent and which is why he went bankrupt. to the engineering community

regarded as a charlton having cheated at the demonstration. ... like the fact one screw is identical to the next. talk about standardization, the legacy of whitworth seems like there's some exploration. >> up to that point screws was each made superfluous. if one screw wouldn't fit another whole or another device and a great baboon of a man came up with the whitworth screw thread, in particular the angle of the screw and the distance between the threads which is

still used today. you get screws, go to a shop, you wouldn't notice this but they would also something like .75 b is w which is british standard whitworth. the legacy of whitworth and 70 of these people who whitworth is more less remembered but who remember henry lordly. >> among all these oddballs and eccentrics and original you had a particular favorite. >> i do. joseph brahma and henry, the two of them. an amazing man. he invented the fountain pen. he invented, just to make it come discussed at work he also made a machine quilt in large numbers. hedging his bets. he made the beer pump which allowed a man pulling things a o have to go down to the stove every time people want another

beer. there was one pub in england called -- invented the flushable toilet. clearly probably -- [applause] very good. >> got applause for that and not for the beer. >> strange. i just come here from bhutan whether default to is the squatting variety. all hail to joseph. he made the lock, beautiful, beautiful exquisite cylinder of a lock because, this is what interesting at least to me, the industrial revolution begins. prior to the industrial revolution the wealthy in england were mainly rural people who lived in castles and so forth. they were protected, security thailand and by fences and by servants. industrial pollution begins. people start making things, factories are open, all powered by steam engines.

suddenly wealthy people are to be found in cities close to the factories come close to the factories but also close to people who were not wealthy and so they suddenly felt vulnerable that their house might be broken into. they built large well constructed houses in cities but protected their doors with locks and the most sophisticated of the locks was made by this fellow who had in his showroom, particularly the west are in the piccadilly, a bow fronted window. on it, it was velvet cushion with his most beautiful lock on it saying anyone who can break this lock without destroying it, i will pay 200 guineas which was a great deal of money. so that's in 1790.

1810 he died. his son took over. the bramah company which still exist today continue to exhibit this lock it was until 1851 joseph whitworth was there in the great exhibition in london, down one of the wings because the exhibition was dominated by gigantic steam locomotives and other trials of the industrial revolution was this little lock still unpacked. an american charles hall from boston said i make a lock in boston which i know cannot be broken and i also know that i can break your. >> he said okay, go if you like. so far and with a a very specialized tools and powerful lights, so forth, he worked for 51 hours. [laughing] before that satisfying click in the lock opened. the bramah people said well, you

met the challenge. we don't feel it's in any way we want our reputation because what burglar can waste 51 hours? [laughing] so here's your 200 guineas. now what about your lock? a man from the back of the crowd said, i think i can pick it. steps forward and using a tiny sliver of wood and the magnifying glass, 15 minutes later, click, and it opened. his name was eli gale. yale. so the yale company and the bramah company prospered and the other faded away. >> since you've taken us to mid century britain, it feels enhancement much like the world today, everything is in flux. industrial relations is changing the landscape. after running to keep up. progress is the word on every

lip. why london, first of all quick second of all, what are the essential differences forward? is the comparison between the mechanical 19th century world and suddenly automated one in which we find ourselves today? >> that's a very interesting question. the thing about these early inventors is that their intentions were based on the thing, on their own hunches and intuitions and sudden flashes of inspiration, whereas an very well-worn phrase, content free workers in the field are standing on the shoulders of giants. i think it was a tremendous exciting way things are being developed in victorian london. no one had seen anything like it before. to give an example to go back to this other unsung hero, a fellow who is involved with bramah in making locks, henry mortally.

very few people remember him today but he was fascinated by the idea of industrial production come how you can make lots of things inexpensively and all looking the same. this a tremendously important ramifications. what he was interested in, in the beginnings of the 19th century was the royal navy, shipping. the royal navy, ships at the time were sailing ships and hoist the sales, up and anchor you needed polling locks, those things you all probably remember from school made from wood which is give you great mechanical advantage. one person could look something wayne many times. they were made of elmwood and they were made by hand. hundreds of carpenters all over southern england. the navy needed about 150,000 of them a year. so he went to the navy and said okay, to turn an elm tree into a

folder block, how many steps does that take? they look very carefully, cut tt the treatment to chunks, smooth it into the approximate shape, bore holes in it, goes on. 43 43 they said. he said okay. i will make 43 machines, each one will do one discrete part of the manufacturer of a pulley block. they gave him a factor in portsmouth 60-mile south of london, and he built these machines and sure enough you would feed elm trees into a hopper that went in one in the factory and outcome would come fully fashion pulley blocks. overnight all of these hundreds of carpenters all over southern england lost their jobs. the only people that maintain this factory were ten unskilled chaps with oil cans and bunches

of cotton was to make sure the machines work. and they might say that the machines work so well that they were still producing pulley blocks in 1965, and not a single one of them had needed to be replaced over that 200 years. that was the first true factor in the world, the first kind of thing that led ultimately to henry ford and mass production. no one aware of the social consequences, and because it had come out of nowhere, everybody utterly amazed such a thing could ever come about. to answer your question, victorian era manufacturing was so transformative that by contrast what seems to be going on now even though just the iphone, the jet engine and so forth are marvels, they seem to be incremental advances on something which began come had a

birthdate and back then was profound in it the way you change the work. >> i don't have to accept the updates on the phone today, right? >> possibly trivial. >> one of the great triumph of the book, you narrate two controversy stories. in your hands would follow precision in two different directions, appreciation for the few verses for the many as as a watch the rolls-royce and the ford motor cars come off the lines. let's talk about henry royce in the making of the first machine and also what a rolls-royce should probably be called or royce roles. one of the many things to buy this book is you will hear simon report a rolls-royce is actually a perfectly reasonable investment. [laughing] >> there are these two hindus, henry royce and henry ford, both born in 1863, both captivated in

youth by the idea of mechanically propelled vehicles. they both own these french -- the reason it works like automobile and garage and so forth are all french is the original engineering originated in france. they both of these machines which were effectively to bicycles bolted together with ten-horsepower, very primitive engine which propelled these two characters along at high speed, noisily, smoke only, no price, nothing sophisticate like that. both men that this was wonderful but both can each man had a different view. henry royce in manchester said i want to perfect this way of driving. i'm going to create the most impeccably engineered automobile

that i possibly can. and restored by contrast said we live in an amazing country with astonishing vistas, with forests and grand canyon and so forth. i'm going to make machine which everyone in the country can afford to buy so that he or she can see the magic of this country. what i concentrate on our two cars, both men almost exactly the same time, 1908-1927. the rolls-royce silver ghost which was made in northern england also oddly enough in springfield massachusetts and the ford model t. they made 8000 rolls-royce is, probably the finest machine ever made mechanically. 80% of them still running today which goes to your point speed is a reasonable investment. >> yes. >> that was your point actually. >> okay.

probably rolls-royce -- the ford model t also from 19 '08-1927, they produce 16 million of the. the crucial differences, this this is where precision comes in, you think of rolls-royce as being popular, , precision but,n fact, it wasn't because they were handmade. so if a part didn't fit properly, , the engineer in chae would simply take a file and filed until it did fit. where as in dearborn, michigan, the production lines that henry ford created, all the parts, whether it's for a carburetor or breaks for transmission or whatever, were in hoppers on the floor above the line. if for some reason they were not interchangeable, they didn't all exactly fit, one came down the chute into the production line and didn't fit, then all of a sudden the production line would grind to a halt and made would

stand rent smoking and chatting while someone worked out what it happen. money would be lost. the line would be interrupted. so precision was a key to making lots of things very cheaply, was not a key to the making of a rolls-royce because we did it as an exercise not so much full-scale production line manufacturing, but in craftsmanship. there was a dichotomy where craft and high precision engineering left, that was the beginning of the last century. >> you want to make it white should be royce-rolls. >> yes. henry royce laboring away the mechanics of this thing. when anyone sell them? how i'm a going to get the word out to the general public? after silver years of failure in this regard, this mayfair-based swell, the honorable charles roles came up to manchester, saw

the early prototypes of the machine, couldn't believe a car could be so quite that you could quite literally put a broom fall martini glass on the, accelerate the car and the wasn't a trace of vibration. and said to royce i will market your car but only on the condition that my name because i'm an aristocrat, should, before yours, merely the engineer. so to this day with a rolls-royce leaves the factory, still made but as you probably will know went bankrupt and is owned by volkswagen, the engineers when it say goodbye to a car don't refer to as a roles but they still call it royce. if you meet in engineer be sure not to use the word roles which they shudder with content when they think of it. he was merely a salesman.

>> says on the subject of human foibles, you basically make it clear precision outstrips our ability to create it and you tell the story of how a single five-centimeter long metal pipe could bring death and airbus over indonesia. how do you feel when you sit on an aircraft? [laughing] >> annoyed. >> i mean, isn't basically a point where the human being has to step out of the picture? >> that's a very good point and that's what i begin to fret about in the closing chapters of the book. i was beginning to reach the limits come on when it of mechanical precision, and an event of a electronic precision. the story to talk about is you can imagine a fully laden double-decker a3 80 airbus leaving singapore for sydney in november of 19 -- 2010.

full, as many of you come out of singapore but heading south, you have to leave airspace very quickly. it's going up at a a severe ane with all the engines absolutely spooled up to the maximum power. suddenly the inboard portside engine explodes and shrapnel is sent all over the place, not only the passenger cabin but shatters the wing. there happened to be five pilots on board and they wrestle this stricken airplane and to get back down to singapore airport and everything is okay. but the analysis of what happened, there was a pipe five centimeters long about the diameter of a drinking straw which had been manufactured in a facility in northern england about a year before, and ms. machined by about 100th of

a millimeter millimeter. tiny, tiny amount. it was put into the plane. the plane on this particular sequence of flights, took off los angeles short one way. the tube was somewhat stressed, called an oil feed stock pipe and said well into one of the bearings in the middle of the jet. i did in london, took off from london and went to singapore. the pipe wasn't at all stressed. took off from singapore and the situation i just described, and the stress with so bad it fractured in this slightly too thin part, oil cascaded all over the injury of the plane. immediately flashed into fire, melted the titanium and it through all the rotor blades off active as pieces of shrapnel. are we beginning to machine things to tolerances which are

too tiny because we are under pressure to build bigger airplanes to take more passengers ever faster and faster? so on that level one wonders. similarly, in the electronic world my iphone is outside but an iphone actively trying to update yesterday -- >> i wasn't trying to update. >> decided not to. has the chip about the size of my pinky fingernail and that is for-quarter billion transistors in it. the transistor was only infant the late 1940s and the first ones were about the size of my fist. now you can cram four and a quarter billion of them. the most chilling statistic i came across from intel is there are no more transistors working in the world today than there are leaves on all the trees in all of the world. i tried up and down and a look at all the trees and i think there is an incalculable number of leaves. you cannot possibly have more

transistors from just up on the mass pike but i do in the. there are. 13 children are being made a day and are operating and such tiny spaces, that they are almost at an atomic level where as if you're heisenberg in a nutshell i do, things start behaving in mysterious fashion. so we're pushing the limits and that's the point of the book. >> you anticipating the end of moore's law? >> we are moving on to this is about computer power will double every year or two years. everything more memory and so on. >> everything is fast and smaller. >> and cheap. they consist, although it looks as if we are with the new generation of optical computing and quantum computing we can go on and go on and go on. i'm not so certain that we can or that we should. that's a whole new argument.

i sort of wax philosophically if that doesn't sound too pretentious. i started when whether we're perhaps worshiping, fetishizing precision too much in forgetting the delights of craftsmanship, the imprecise, the human scale kind of thing. and so i think that's an important thing to take stock of. everything is going in such a whirlwind of progress and yet where is it getting as? >> you do that beautifully when you talk about going to japan which is a culture that prioritizes both which is mind-boggling. the factory we have handmade watches being turned out at a rate of 25,000? 120 a week, right, and the robotic assembly line turned ou. >> twenty-five quarts watches. it did it without taking royalties and sold them gave a

judgment in the world which one of the reasons the collapse which is now recovered but most of the swiss and mechanical watch interest. seiko has this production line on the second floor of a factor in northern japan and you said producing 25,000 quartz watch movies every day. but on the same floor you go through is that the double doors and there are these crass men and women, each one producing mechanical watches for things that we sort of forgotten like air springs and main springs in the jeweled movements producing about 100 a day. they revere craftsmanship in the handmade and have to say, in my own part in massachusetts we have eight mechanical clocks which i whine every sunday morning. i actually will miss tomorrow and it vexes me. i will do it tomorrow night. i wind them all and at that

moment 8:00 on a sunday morning all eight clocks are in rate. tuesday they're their startingl out of rate. [laughing] wednesday, thursday complete shambles. [laughing] but that just might of the above the line from the novel 40 night about walking through the streets of oxford late one night and listening to the college clocks chimed midnight, she says, in friendly disagreement. [laughing] i love the idea and i prefer a world where there's friendly disagreement and other precisio precision. >> you bring this perfect to a last question and it will take of audits. i can't help but ask you, so much clarity on the page but you your writing about with the title which is exactly with a perfectionist has precision in the title. clarity is your specialty.

did you feel yet to bring this to a whole new standard? was the additional pressure on you in some way? >> the paperback is about to come up. i knew this would happen. i never had a book where more readers have pointed out mercifully small -- [laughing] when i send messages to the publishers i don't say here is a list of 175 directions. i say 175 improvements. [laughing] >> there is a microphone in the middle if there are questions from the audience. in the meantime, we all use gps every day. i had no idea that gps really worked. do you want to speak quickly before your first question about the two clocks in easton? >> yes. easton who invented -- two rival quote inventors of gps, but the way it's done now and it is

effectively they have these formidably accurate clocks in the 32 satellites the make up america's calculation of gps devices, and the time that signals take to travel from earth up to the satellites when it is triangulated by three or four of five satellites gives your position on earth, astonishing accuracy. i used to run, 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 rate down in the north sea to within an accuracy of about 200 meters i suppose. nowadays, i went to a japanese research ship which use gps and the american gps system is a best in the world, they can locate themselves on the ocean. you know what a wilderness the

ocean is, to within half a centimeter. that to me is quite extraordinary and it's all run from an air base in colorado. no one ever talks about. no one knows about it. utterly secure. there are competing gps systems. the chinese are coming up, the russians and the europeans with galileo but the gps system run by the united states is the best and it is free, one of the great trials of 20th century technology, except it is made us forget the joy of maps. i am going back to the whole from the discreet about clocks. i love and collect maps and want a simple to use them, take that out of the glove compartment, study them rather than simply say take us there. i'm sorry, i rant a lot in this book. >> summit has to refold the map. >> that's true, yes.

>> something in line with your story about serial production. you were talking about manufacturing in serial production where everything is identical. something you mentioned rules. an interesting highlight of roles is 1909, the short brothers formally of rochester, later of belfast, northern ireland, the three brothers started an aircraft company. sign a license agreement with the two wright brothers and proceeded to build six byte flyers in series. the first serial production of powered aircraft anywhere in the world. the purchaser of the six aircraft was mr. roles -- >> who died in. >> and he proceeded to kill himself. [laughing] >> very nice to sit there and i say that 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 to the aircraft were made in northern china. you would see that the wings with, on the trans-siberian siberian railway to moscow transferred to another train to take into amsterdam, put on a ferry and taken across to liverpool, , put on another fery to belfast and then bolted onto the aircraft which i thought was delightful insanity. [laughing] [inaudible] >> i beg your pardon? [inaudible] >> i hope what i said was true. 176 improvements. >> so besides avoiding take-up from singapore, what would you

say about daily life that we can take away from your book? >> say that again. >> yes. you mention the stress of taking up short airspace in singapore may create some receipt for a place because the precision of the part. so besides that, what other practical advice for daily life you have them we can take away from your book? >> practical other than not taking airplanes. [laughing] i i think one has to have faithn the precision, things are going to work everyday, motorcars and coffeemakers and so forth. you have to assume that they are properly made. but when they do break down and perhaps the reason is an imprecise part, then lower your guard but be aware that precision is not an infallible thing, that it is something we should take for granted maybe,

also have some caution. which goes back to my point about not worshiping it. so be thankful for it but be cautious. and to make things by hand yourself. i love the fact that in korea and japan and china, mostly in korea and japan, people, they're usually elderly people, who make things by hand and make them beautifully are awarded the title of living national treasure and are given pensions by the government and reverence by the people. i would like countries that repair precision and precision essentially only, united states, britain, germany most notably come to say wait a minute, let us also give our respective people who make the imprecise and to make things by hand. i would love the japanese endocrine system to come here as well. thank you very much.

[applause] >> i wanted to know if during your research do you find any notable stories of industrial espionage or where technology would be stolen? i know what people think about that think a lot about the second world war. but do you find any notorious trends, especially more recent? >> let me tell you a short story. i live in western massachusetts as i said, and the river that courses down from my village, the farmington river, there's a valley which leads down 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. there was a lot, at least the was in a 20th century, a lot of metallic manufacturing and there was a company in torrington which is a town maybe half an hour from where i live

where there was a company, i think they were called hindi and company. and just before the outbreak of the second world war they get a lot of business with the company in frankfort i think also a mechanical engineering company. they decided to have a contest to see you could make the most precise little thing. the people in torrington worked long and hard and produced a steel rod about a 16th of an inch in diameter, perfectly straight, beautifully polished, unvarying in its service. they put in a wooden box can sit it across to germany. then just before the war broke out, the germans responded by sending back a box which a people and ranked an open and the tissue paper and identical steel rod, same length, same

diameter, same brilliant policy, same straightness and they thought they simply copied is. then they noticed to their horror that, in fact, a whole had been poured down the center of the tube and they were aghast. how is that possible that that could be done? in the war broke out and all correspondence broke down until in 1945 both companies survived the war, and the managing director of the german company came over to america and came up to torrington, and the two bosses had lunch together and ruefully the american said, i still can't get over how you board the whole and that steel rod you made so brilliantly. we were bested, bears, it was horrible. the german said that's the reason i've come to see because, in fact, we cheated. we drew the whole first of all and a block of steel and then machined around it, which was perfectly easy thing to do. so i coveted say that what you

did was actually the most perfect thing and we simply cheated, which is why he said we lost the war. [laughing] >> so on that note i would like to ask for a round of applause and thank simon winchester. [applause] and stacy schiff. thank you so much. as you know, autographing will be taking place on this floor, past the elevator on the north side of the floor. if you have a ticket into the next program, you may remain in the room. if you don't ask that you leave as soon as possible. thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] >> host: gina loudon author of "mad politics: keeping your sanity in a world gone crazy" is our guest o