Dead Smooth

Dead Smooth takes its name from the finest grade of file, the one that leaves nothing more to take off. These six books follow Philadelphia’s trade in precision. They open at Disston, once the largest saw maker in the world and still a name woodworkers seek out. Then they follow the work from steel poured at Midvale to William Sellers’s machine tools and the screw thread the nation adopted as its standard. From there they move to finer things, the instruments for measuring and the lenses and apparatus of Queen & Company. They end at S.S. White, where precision was fitted to the body: false teeth and the dentist’s tools.