The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World

“We were just about to sit down to dinner when my father, a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, said that he had something to show me. He opened his briefcase and from it drew a large and evidently very heavy wooden box.

It was a London winter evening in the mid-1950s, almost certainly wretched, with cold and yellowish smog. I was about ten years old, home from boarding school for the Christmas holidays. My father had come in from his factory in North London, brushing flecks of gray industrial sleet from the shoulders of his army officer’s greatcoat. He was standing in front of the coal fire to warm himself, his pipe between his teeth. My mother was bustling about in the kitchen, and in time she carried the dishes into the dining room.

But first there was the matter of the box.”

Excerpt From The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester