I was thinking about it for a while: The instruments to produce things and to measure things improve in precision as the technical progress goes on. For example modern machine tools allow us to produce things with tolerance of 1 micron or less. But this machine tool was made with something And that thing was made with something too. And since the tech level was lower back then you’d have to make a more precise machine tool using a less precise one. How is this possible?
In: Engineering
There are several ways to make precise things with less precise starting materials. You can make a flat surface using three rough starting surfaces, and you can use the flat surfaces to build a lathe that can make precision round surfaces. With precision round surfaces you can make vacuum pumps and seals, and in a vacuum chamber you can use physical or chemical vapor deposition to deposit atomically precise layers of metals.
The youtube chanel Machine Thinking has several great videos about such topics. I can especially recommend “The origins of precision” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58) and “The 1751 machine that made everything” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA).
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