This week the History Channel begins a series about master craftsmen. There must have been such masters in every century and in every culture: the men – and occasionally women – who were exquisitely skilled with their hands, and were simply the best.

Yes, there were women. In the eighteenth century Eleanor Coade, daughter of a wool-merchant from Exeter, set up her own business on the south bank in London making artificial stone, and ran it for 50 years. No one has ever made better artificial stone.

Leonardo da Vinci was a fantastic dreamer and technical artist, but alas did not actually build anything. A couple of generations earlier, however, his fellow-Italian Filippo Brunelleschi had not only invented the technique of perspective drawing but built the extraordinary dome of the cathedral in Florence, one of the wonders of the age. His influence was as great as that of Christopher Wren in seventeenth century England.

This series ranges from samurai sword-makers and mediaeval castle builders to shipwrights and gun-smiths, and I look forward to seeing it. However, my own craft hero of all time would be Henry Maudslay, the father of precision engineering. He started working at the age of 12 filling cartridges with gunpowder at Woolwich Arsenal, but in his teens moved into the blacksmith’s forge. There he learned to love the iron, to work with the metal, rather than fighting against it, and soon became renowned for his skill in bending the iron to his will. He spent ten years making Joseph Bramah’s new unpickable locks, and then set up on his own, putting in his shop window a precision screw that he had cut on his own lathe.

The French engineer Marc Brunel wanted to build machine tools in order to make pulley-blocks for the navy, and was persuaded to hire Maudslay for the job by the perfection of that screw. Thus Maudslay built the world’s first ever mechanized production-line; 200 years later some of his machines are still there in the block-making house in Portsmouth docks.

With his lathe Maudslay made a micrometer that he called the Lord Chancellor, because it could measure to a ten-thousandth of an inch, and so settle any argument in the workshop. One of his workmen said it was a pleasure to see him handle a tool of any kind, but he was quite splendid with an 18-inch file.