Simon Winchester, a former foreign correspondent and prolific popular historian, takes precision itself as his subject: the gradual cultural and technological achievement of being able to make things to within thousandths of an inch, then to nanometers, and the long chain of social consequences that followed. The book begins in eighteenth-century England with John Wilkinson, who bored cannon barrels true enough to let James Watt's steam engine work; moves through Henry Maudslay's screw-cutting lathes, Joseph Bramah's locks, and the American Civil War armorers who first made interchangeable parts at scale; and continues through Henry Ford's assembly lines, the Hubble Space Telescope, GPS, and the photolithography that produces modern microchips. Winchester argues that precision is one of the underappreciated foundations of modernity, the discipline that connects engineering, science, and economic life. He pairs that argument with a more melancholic countertheme: the loss, as machines become more exact, of the older crafts whose tolerances were generous but whose products were idiosyncratic and human. His chapter on Japanese craftsmanship and the philosophy of wabi-sabi makes the case directly. The book is an excellent introduction to the history of technology for general readers and is filled with the kind of well-told anecdote and biographical detail that has made Winchester a perennial bestseller.