The personal result was that while Henry Royce became respectably well off as a consequence of his endeavors, Henry Ford, by contrast, became one of the wealthiest men on the planet and in all that planet’s history—and he left as legacy not just a car company that to this day remains one of the world’s largest, but a foundation that spreads his legacy of wealth to the deserving many around the world.
And precision’s differing roles in the two companies? Within Rolls-Royce, it may seem as though the worship of the precise was entirely central to the making of these enormously comfortable, stylish, swift, and comprehensively memorable cars. In fact, it was far more crucial to the making of the less costly, less complex, less remembered machines that poured from the Ford plants around the world. And for a simple reason: the production lines required a limitless supply of parts that were exactly interchangeable. If one happened not to be so exact, and if an assembly-line worker tried to fit this inexact and imprecise component into a passing workpiece and it refused to fit and the worker tried to make it fit, and wrestled with it—then, just like Charlie Chaplin’s assembly-line worker in Modern Times or, less amusingly, one in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the line would slow and falter and eventually stop, and workers for yards around would find their work disrupted, and parts being fed into the system would create unwieldy piles, and the supply chain would clog, and the entire production would slow and falter and maybe even grind, quite literally, to a painful halt.
Precision, in other words, is an absolute essential for keeping the unforgiving tyranny of a production line going. As far as a handmade car is concerned, though, upfront precision is quite optional. It is a need that could be attended to during the hand-making process, as the process itself never depends (at least, not in the Silver Ghost days) upon every component’s being precise from the commencement of manufacturing. The irony remains: a Rolls-Royce is so costly and exclusive and has enjoyed for so long a reputation of peerless creation and impeccable performance, but it does not require absolute precision at all stages of its making. A Model T Ford, however (or, indeed, any modern car, now made by robots rather than human beings, by Chaplinesque figures staring glassy-eyed at the endlessly flowing river of parts), requires precision as an absolute essential. Without it, the car doesn’t get made.
THERE IS ONE further component to this story: the use by Henry Ford of an invention that helped make it possible for the cost of his Model T to decrease almost every year during its eighteen years of production, to go down in price from $850 in 1908 to $345 in 1916, to a stunningly affordable $260 in 1925.
The car was the same, the materials the same, but the means of production had become vastly more efficient. Henry Ford had been helped in his aim of making it so by using one component (and then buying the firm that made it), a component whose creation, by a Swedish man of great modesty, turned out to be of profoundly lasting importance to the world of precision.
The Swede was Carl Edvard Johansson, popularly and proudly known by every knowledgeable Swede today as the world’s Master of Measurement. He was the inventor of the set of precise pieces of perfectly flat, hardened steel known to this day as gauge blocks, slip gauges, or, to his honor and in his memory, as Johansson gauges, or quite simply, Jo blocks—the same polished steel blocks and tiny billets my father brought home to show me back in the mid-1950s as an example of what precision was truly all about.
Carl Edvard Johansson got the idea while on a train. He was at the time, in 1896, working as an armorer-inspector at a government-run firearms factory in the city of Eskilstuna, Sweden’s steel making equivalent of Pittsburgh or Sheffield, and which still has a steelworker on its coat of arms. His plant had been making Remington rifles under license but was just then switching to a variant of the German Mauser carbine and, in the process, was changing to an entirely new system of measuring. Johansson, who had an abiding respect for ultraprecise measurement, had gone to the Mauser factory in the German Black Forest to investigate the company’s ways of measuring, and for some reason, he found its scheme wanting. According to legend, he was pondering the idea of making improvements to the forthcoming Swedish operation while on the long and otherwise tedious rail journey home.
His idea was to create a set of gauge blocks that, if held together in combination, could in theory measure any needed dimension. What, he wondered, was the minimum number of blocks that would be needed, and what should the sizes of the various blocks be? By the time he stepped off the clanking steam train at Eskilstuna station, he had solved the problem: with just 103 blocks made of certain carefully specified sizes, arranged in three series, it should be possible, he said, to take some twenty thousand measurements in increments of one one-thousandth of a millimeter, just by laying two or more blocks together.
It took Johansson some long while to make the first prototype set—he used his wife’s sewing machine, converting it by adding a grinding wheel, to smooth the blocks to their correct dimensions. It was a task well suited to his personality, a biographer later recalled. For Johansson was, by all accounts, a modest, retiring, unassuming, private, pipe-smoking, mustachioed, patient, formal, stooped, eternally avuncular son of the croft, a man who grew up on a rye farm in central Sweden and, yet, went on to change the world. The 103-piece combination gauge block set he eventually developed, according to his biographer, has since “directly and indirectly taught engineers, foremen and mechanics to treat tools with care, and at the same time giving them familiarity with [dimensions of] thousandths and ten thousandths of a millimeter.”
Gauge blocks first came to the United States in 1908, the initial set of them brought through customs by Henry Leland, the machinist and precision fanatic best known as the Man Who Invented the Cadillac.* Just as with the nineteenth-century demand for wooden pulley blocks for the Royal Navy—no connection at all, other than ironically—sales of the new Jo blocks rocketed, as more and more industries were established, all of them demanding this simple and elegant means of measuring their various products. Eventually, Johansson himself was persuaded to set up shop in America, first in New York and then to make block sets in an old three-story piano factory in Poughkeepsie, a hundred miles to the north, on the Hudson River. His arrival was greeted by the press: “The Most Accurate Man in the World,” said one. “The Edison of Sweden.”
Henry Ford bought the American gauge block business of its inventor, Carl Edvard Johansson, the Swede still known today as the world’s “Master of Measurement.” With the use of so-called Jo blocks, extreme tolerances could be realized swiftly, further increasing the efficiency and reliability of engineered products.
At the time, Henry Ford did not make use of Jo blocks in his factories, even though his entire system of mass production depended wholly on the most extreme accuracy. Whether he was implacably opposed, or whether there was some other reason, remains unclear: his opposition or insouciance ended swiftly, however, once he became aware of a sharp exchange between his factory managers and the Swedish ball-bearing maker SKF.
This firm, founded in 1907 and still in existence—its initials stand for Svenska Kullagerfabriken AB—was receiving from Ford in the 1920s what it claimed were numerous “unjustified complaints” regarding the dimensions of its bearings. Ford workers on the Detroit production lines claimed that the SKF bearings were often significantly out of true, and were causing delays and stoppages on the factory floor. SKF managers protested robustly, insisting that their bearings were perfectly spherical, and that measuring them using Jo blocks would demonstrate that this was so.
As indeed the Jo blocks duly demonstrated. If any complaints were to be leveled, said officials from SKF, they should by rights be leveled at the machines and assembly lines on which the bearings were being used—and Henry Ford, to his horror, realized that they were right. Maybe, he said to his colleagues assembled for an emergency meeting, his cars were precise only to themselves; maybe every manufactured piece fit impeccably because it was interchangeable to itself, but once another abso
lutely impeccably manufactured, gauge-block-confirmed piece from another company (a ball bearing from SKF, say) was introduced into the Ford system, then maybe its absolute perfection trumped that of Ford’s, and Ford was wrong—ever so slightly maybe, but wrong nonetheless.
So Ford, being powerful and rich and unstoppably ambitious, did what others might not have had the moxie to do. He made contact with Johansson and persuaded him to move his entire gauge block production process seven hundred miles, from Poughkeepsie to Detroit, and set up shop within the vast new Ford factory there. Johansson did as he was bidden, and in due course, and in line with Ford’s relentlessly persuasive manner, he then sold up and allowed his small, elderly, old-fashioned, yet vitally important business to become a division of the Ford Motor Company—to be swallowed up, in other words—and then, in 1936, left Henry Ford to his own devices and went quietly back to his native Sweden, there to collect gold medals and honorary degrees and visiting fellowships and royally bestowed distinctions in impressive numbers.
Johansson grew deaf in his later years, and used an ear trumpet, which he called his pipe of peace. He once met Edison, who was deaf as well, and he liked to recall how the two great inventors put their heads together, quite literally, and discussed gauge blocks, which by this time, after the Great War, were achieving accuracies of up to one-millionth of an inch. But can you maybe do better than even that? Edison inquired. Yes, replied Johansson, it was now possible to achieve precision tolerances down to one ten-millionth of an inch, but he would not reveal exactly how. Quite right, the notoriously cantankerous and ungenerous Edison harrumphed. Far better to keep quiet where matters of invention are concerned.
Carl Edvard Johansson died in 1943, respected and beloved in Sweden, and forgotten elsewhere. The industrial system of mass production that his invention unwittingly helped refine and expand, and which relies on as absolute a degree of precision as is attainable, continues to this day—on the ground and, more perilously, high up in the air as well, where any failure of precision can be unimaginably dangerous.
Chapter 6
(TOLERANCE: 0.000 000 000 001)
Precision and Peril, Six Miles High
It was like love at first sight: [Frank] Whittle held all the winning cards: imagination, ability, enthusiasm, determination, respect for science, and practical experience—all at the service of a stunningly simple idea: 2000 hp with one moving part.
—LANCELOT LAW WHYTE, “WHITTLE AND THE JET ADVENTURE,” HARPER’S MAGAZINE (JANUARY 1954)
When it comes to the steady and uncomplaining workings of a device such as a tricycle, a sewing machine, a wristwatch, or a water pump, mechanical perfection is naturally a good thing—but perhaps it is also a thing that is seldom essential to the preservation of life and limb. In the matter of a high-powered sports car or an elevator or a robotic operating theater, however, precision comes to be a vital necessity: mechanical failure occasioned by imprecision at a hundred miles an hour or on the sixtieth floor of a skyscraper or in the middle of heart surgery could have terrible, maybe lethal results.
Furthermore, in those situations where high speed is combined with high altitude, when paying customers are suspended unnaturally many miles above the planet’s all-too-hard surfaces, and, moreover, in a place where the human presence is inherently unwelcome and life unsustainable, the precision of the aircraft machinery that took them up there has to be utterly impeccable. Any departure from absolute perfection could have the potential for the gravest and most disastrous of consequences—as the world came to know just a few minutes after 10:00 a.m. on the sunny Singapore morning of Thursday, November 4, 2010.
Qantas Flight 32, a two-year-old Airbus A380 double-decker “superjumbo” jet aircraft, at the time the largest commercial airliner in the world, was beginning a routine seven-hour flight down to Sydney. There were four hundred forty passengers aboard, two dozen cabin crew, and a slightly unusually large number of five men in the cockpit: a captain, a first officer, a second officer, a check captain, and a supervising check captain, this last on board to check the check captain, who in turn was there to check the performance of the rest of the crew. Among them, the five had an accumulated total of seventy-two thousand hours of flight time, an amassment of experience that would be sorely needed that morning.
The aircraft had taken off at two minutes before ten from one of Changi Airport’s two southwest-heading runways, 20C. The plane’s landing gear was promptly retracted, the thrust settings on the four Rolls-Royce Trent 900-series engines were set to Climb mode, and the 511 tons of aircraft, cargo, and human passengers began to claw their relentless way upward. Within moments, the aircraft had left Singaporean airspace and entered that of the Republic of Indonesia. It was powering into the cloudless sky at a mile and a half above the mangrove swamps and small fishing villages of Batam Island when, suddenly, to the surprise, dismay, and consternation of almost everyone aboard, there were two very loud bangs, one quickly after the other.
The captain immediately overrode the automatic pilot and ordered his aircraft to cease climbing, to keep itself level at seven thousand feet, and to maintain its southerly heading. The cockpit monitors at first indicated only one event: the overheating of a turbine in the number two engine, which was on the left wing, the inboard engine, the one closer to the fuselage. Within seconds, though, this single announcement became a drizzle, then a flurry, and finally a violent storm of flashing lights and sirens and alarm bells as, one after another, systems all around the aircraft were shown to be failing. And within the number two engine, the overheating had now transformed itself into a raging fire.
The captain radioed a “pan-pan” message back to Singapore air traffic control, a message indicating a serious problem, though less than an all-out emergency. He then decided to turn back toward Singapore, to ease himself into a race track holding pattern, to use half an hour of stable flying to work out what exactly had happened to the engine, and to decide how best to deal with the cascade of problems its breakdown had occasioned. Meanwhile, fuel could be seen gushing from the rear of the engine, and a peppering of holes could be seen in the wing, where debris from an explosion of some kind had clearly smashed into it. Reports were also coming in from down below that pieces of aircraft engine had been found in villages on Batam Island, all of them clearly spewed from the damaged plane.
Takeoff is optional, they say; landings are compulsory. It took the better part of an hour for the crew to deal with the various problems afflicting their stricken aircraft, and to work out just how to land when all manner of critical parts of the aircraft were no longer working. The brakes, for example, seemed to be only partially functioning, the spoilers on the left wing could not be deployed, there was no working thrust reverser on the failed engine, and the landing gear could not be properly cranked down for touchdown. The plane would thus come in for a very fast landing, and with ninety-five extra tons of fuel aboard and badly compromised brakes, it might not be able to stop itself before running out of the almost three miles of runway. The airport was asked to scramble its fleet of emergency vehicles and wait for the approach of the giant jet.
In the event, the massive plane did manage to bring itself to a stop—the captain near-frantically pressing the pedals hard to the metal—with just over four hundred feet of runway left. What didn’t stop was the number one engine, on the left wing’s outboard. The number two had been fatally damaged and was not running, but for some reason—because the control cables and electrical connections had been severed, it later transpired, by whatever had crashed through the wings—its near neighbor still was.
Moreover, torrents of fuel were still gushing from ruptured tanks near the number two engine, and most worrisome of all, such brakes as remained on the left-hand side of the aircraft body had overheated during the high-speed, heavy landing and were now red-hot, registering almost a thousand degrees Celsius on the cockpit display.
To add to the grisly picture, the tires had ruptured and were ripped a
nd flat, allowing the bare metal of the wheel rims to scrape along the runway for hundreds of feet. Were any wafts of the gushing fog of fuel, perhaps blown by the jet thrust from the unshutdownable number one engine, to have washed over the near-incandescent brakes or the superhot wheel rims, there would likely have been a spark, a sudden flash of fire, and then, when the wing fuel tanks were properly heated, an almighty explosion. The brief relief of the safe landing would have been replaced by the utter horror of an immobilized plane fully consumed by flames. It was a chaotic and terrifying situation—now much worse on the ground, it seemed, than ever it had been up in the air.
It took the Singapore firefighters three hours to stop the running engine, in effect by drowning it with high-powered jets of thousands of gallons of water. Engines are built to withstand rainstorms, and it is a testimony to the robust design and construction of these Rolls-Royce Trents that it took so immense a simulated rainstorm to bring this fast-spinning machine to a stop. But just as soon as it became evident that the engine would be brought under control, and once the thousands of pounds of fire-retardant foam and dry powder fire suppressor had brought the red-hot brakes back to black and reasonable cool, the passengers, who had been cooped up for two hours in what seemed like a firetrap, were let out, clambering down a set of stairs brought to the seldom-used right-hand doors. Many of the four hundred forty were terrified, but no one was hurt.
And then the crew was finally able to see what had happened. It was an ugly sight, seldom seen or experienced by even the most senior of the flight crew. They could now see that the aft third of the cowling of the number two engine had been torn away, the turbine section of the engine stripped naked, and two gaping holes were visible where part of the engine structure had been blown apart. There was soot, oil, burned wiring, smashed pipes, and parts of damaged rotor blades everywhere.