by
Canaletto, 1732. watermill, UK (14th century).
Max Weber considered production during ancient and medieval times as never warranting classification as factories, with methods of production and the contemporary economic situation incomparable to modern or even pre-modern developments of industry. In ancient times, the earliest production limited to the household, developed into a separate endeavor independent to the place of inhabitation with production at that time only beginning to be characteristic of industry, termed as "unfree shop industry", a situation caused especially under the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh, with slave employment and no differentiation of skills within the slave group comparable to modern definitions as
division of labour. According to translations of Demosthenes and Herodotus,
Naucratis was a, or the only, factory in the entirety of ancient
Egypt. A source of 1983 (Hopkins), states the largest factory production in ancient times was of 120 slaves within fourth century BC Athens. An article within the New York Times article dated 13 October 2011 states: ... discovered at
Blombos Cave, a cave on the south coast of South Africa where 100,000-year-old tools and ingredients were found with which
early modern humans mixed an
ochre-based
paint. Although The
Cambridge Online Dictionary definition of factory states: elsewhere: The first machine is stated by one source to have been traps used to assist with the capturing of animals, corresponding to the machine as a mechanism operating independently or with very little force by interaction from a human, with a capacity for use repeatedly with operation exactly the same on every occasion of functioning. The
wheel was invented , the spoked wheel . The
Iron Age began approximately 1200–1000 BC. However, other sources define machinery as a means of production. Archaeology provides a date for the earliest city as 5000 BC as Tell Brak (Ur
et al. 2006), therefore a date for cooperation and factors of demand, by an increased community size and population to make something like factory level production a conceivable necessity. Archaeologist Bonnet, unearthed the foundations of numerous
workshops in the city of
Kerma proving that as early as 2000 BC Kerma was a large urban capital. The
watermill was first made before the end of the third century BC. In the third century BC,
Philo of Byzantium describes a water-driven wheel in his technical treatises. Factories producing
garum were common in the
Roman Empire. The
Barbegal aqueduct and mills are an industrial complex from the second century AD found in southern France. By the time of the fourth century AD, there was a water-milling installation with a capacity to grind 28 tons of grain per day, a rate sufficient to meet the needs of 80,000 persons, in the Roman Empire. The large population increase in medieval Islamic cities, such as
Baghdad's 1.5 million population, led to the development of large-scale factory milling installations with higher productivity to feed and support the large growing population. A tenth-century grain-processing factory in the Egyptian town of
Bilbays, for example, milled an estimated 300 tons of grain and flour per day. The
Venice Arsenal also provides one of the first examples of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in
Venice,
Republic of Venice, several hundred years before the
Industrial Revolution, it
mass-produced ships on
assembly lines using
manufactured parts. The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people.
Industrial Revolution as it is today. factory in
Tampere, Finland in 1909 One of the earliest factories was
John Lombe's
water-powered silk mill at
Derby, operational by 1721. By 1746, an integrated
brass mill was working at
Warmley near
Bristol. Raw material went in at one end, was
smelted into brass and was turned into pans, pins, wire, and other goods. Housing was provided for workers on site.
Josiah Wedgwood in Staffordshire and
Matthew Boulton at his
Soho Manufactory were other prominent early industrialists, who employed the factory system. The factory system began widespread use somewhat later when
cotton spinning was mechanized.
Richard Arkwright is the person credited with inventing the prototype of the modern factory. After he patented his
water frame in 1769, he established
Cromford Mill, in
Derbyshire, England, significantly expanding the village of
Cromford to accommodate the migrant workers new to the area. The factory system was a new way of organizing
workforce made necessary by the development of machines which were too large to house in a worker's cottage. Working hours were as long as they had been for the farmer, that is, from dawn to dusk, six days per week. Overall, this practice essentially reduced skilled and unskilled workers to replaceable commodities. Arkwright's factory was the first successful cotton spinning factory in the world; it showed unequivocally the way ahead for industry and was widely copied. Between 1770 and 1850 mechanized factories supplanted traditional artisan shops as the predominant form of manufacturing institution, because the larger-scale factories enjoyed a significant technological and supervision advantage over the small artisan shops. The earliest factories (using the
factory system) developed in the cotton and wool textiles industry. Later generations of factories included mechanized shoe production and manufacturing of machinery, including machine tools. After this came factories that supplied the railroad industry included rolling mills, foundries and locomotive works, along with agricultural-equipment factories that produced cast-steel plows and reapers. Bicycles were mass-produced beginning in the 1880s. The
Nasmyth, Gaskell and Company's Bridgewater Foundry, which began operation in 1836, was one of the earliest factories to use modern materials handling such as cranes and rail tracks through the buildings for handling heavy items. Large scale
electrification of factories began around 1900 after the development of the
AC motor which was able to run at constant speed depending on the number of poles and the current electrical frequency. At first larger motors were added to
line shafts, but as soon as small horsepower motors became widely available, factories switched to unit drive. Eliminating
line shafts freed factories of layout constraints and allowed factory layout to be more efficient. Electrification enabled sequential
automation using
relay logic.
Assembly line Henry Ford further revolutionized the factory concept in the early 20th century, with the innovation of the
mass production. Highly specialized laborers situated alongside a series of rolling ramps would build up a product such as (in Ford's case) an
automobile. This concept dramatically decreased production costs for virtually all manufactured goods and brought about the age of
consumerism. In the mid - to late 20th century, industrialized countries introduced next-generation factories with two improvements: • Advanced
statistical methods of
quality control, pioneered by the American mathematician
William Edwards Deming, whom his home country initially ignored. Quality control turned Japanese factories into world leaders in
cost-effectiveness and production quality. •
Industrial robots on the factory floor, introduced in the late 1970s. These computer-controlled welding arms and grippers could perform simple tasks such as attaching a car door quickly and flawlessly 24 hours a day. This too cut costs and improved speed. Some speculation as to the future of the factory includes scenarios with
rapid prototyping,
nanotechnology, and
orbital zero-
gravity facilities. There is some scepticism about the development of the factories of the future if the robotic industry is not matched by a higher technological level of the people who operate it. According to some authors, the four basic pillars of the factories of the future are strategy, technology, people and habitability, which would take the form of a kind of "laboratory factories", with management models that allow "producing with quality while experimenting to do it better tomorrow". == Historically significant factories ==