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
Well there is a need for a standard for calibration, then it is scaled.
For example if you have a ‘standard’ meter length (in the old days, this was a metal bar stored in a national standards lab). Things like an inclined plane (or screw) provides a means to scale movement. In crude terms, make an inclined slope with a 10:1 ratio, now every 1 m moved laterally, moves you 10cm vertically. If that 1m is calibrated then the 10cm is similarly calibrated. Take that 10cm, do the same now you have 1cm calibrated. And so on. If you wind that inclined plane over a cylinder, what you get is a screw. Now you can say, “so many turns of the screw, moves the shaft of the screw up and down a certain amount”.
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