Question of the Day!

I believe there is no such thing as perfection... as an Engineer, I learned early on that we cannot create it at any level of existence. Then I learned the secret to life and making things from my grandfather... "Tolerance." One cannot push a shaft of exactly one inch in diameter through a hole that also measures exactly one inch in diameter. There must be a difference in the sizes of the two items.

But the difference needed is determined by the environment of existence. Everything affects the outcome: temperature, gravity, input force, alignment, the speed necessity, and a dozen other physical factors and considerations. The ease of accomplishing any goal is dictated by the distance we are from perfection.

In my younger days, I briefly interned at a tool and die company. At an industry convention, our CEO boasted about our product line, touting our 0.003-inch drill bit. A few weeks later, a competitor sent us one of our bits with a 0.001 hole drilled through the end of our bit!

For those who are not engineers or mathematicians, a human hair, on average, is about 70 microns in diameter, which is 0.0028 inches So the drill bit we worked so hard to make was about the size of a human hair, our competitor sent us our drill bit back with a hole one third of the diameter of that human hair. It was a humbling experience and a valuable lesson about striving for perfection.