Pre-industrial on show at a
museum in Yekaterinburg, Russia. from 1568 shows the left printer removing a page from the press while the one at the right inks the text blocks. Such a duo could reach 14,000 hand movements per working day, printing around 3,600 pages in the process. Standardized parts and sizes and factory production techniques were developed in pre-industrial times; before the invention of
machine tools the manufacture of precision parts, especially metal ones, was highly labour-intensive.
Crossbows made with bronze parts were produced in
China during the
Warring States period. The
Qin Emperor unified China at least in part by equipping large armies with these weapons, which were fitted with a sophisticated trigger mechanism made of interchangeable parts. The
Terracotta Army guarding
the Emperor's tomb is also believed to have been created through the use of standardized molds on an
assembly line. In
ancient Carthage,
ships of war were mass-produced on a large scale at a moderate cost, allowing them to efficiently maintain their control of the
Mediterranean. Many centuries later, the
Republic of Venice would follow Carthage in producing ships with
prefabricated parts on an assembly line: the
Venetian Arsenal produced nearly one ship every day in what was effectively the world's first
factory, which at its height employed 16,000 people. The invention of
movable type has allowed for documents such as
books to be mass produced. The first movable type system was invented in China by
Bi Sheng, during the reign of the
Song dynasty, where it was used to, among other things, issue
paper money. The oldest extant book produced using
metal type is
Jikji, printed in Korea in the year 1377.
Johannes Gutenberg, through his invention of the
printing press and production of the
Gutenberg Bible, introduced movable type to Europe. Through this introduction, mass production in the European publishing industry was made commonplace, leading to a
democratization of knowledge, increased literacy and education, and the beginnings of modern
science. French artillery engineer
Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval introduced the standardization of cannon design in the late 18th century. He streamlined production and management of cannonballs and cannons by limiting them to only three calibers, and he improved their effectiveness by requiring more spherical ammunition. Redesigning these weapons to use interchangeable wheels, screws, and axles simplified mass production and repair.
Industrial In the
Industrial Revolution, simple mass production techniques were used at the
Portsmouth Block Mills in England to make ships' pulley blocks for the
Royal Navy in the
Napoleonic Wars. It was achieved in 1803 by
Marc Isambard Brunel in cooperation with
Henry Maudslay under the management of Sir
Samuel Bentham. The Navy was in a state of expansion that required 100,000
pulley blocks to be manufactured a year. Bentham had already achieved remarkable efficiency at the docks by introducing power-driven machinery and reorganising the dockyard system. Brunel, a pioneering engineer, and Maudslay, a pioneer of machine tool technology who had developed the first industrially practical
screw-cutting lathe in 1800 which standardized
screw thread sizes for the first time which in turn allowed the application of
interchangeable parts, collaborated on plans to manufacture block-making machinery. By 1805, the dockyard had been fully updated with the revolutionary, purpose-built machinery at a time when products were still built individually with different components. Mass production techniques were also used to rather limited extent to make clocks and watches, and to make small arms, though parts were usually non-interchangeable. Though produced on a very small scale,
Crimean War gunboat engines designed and assembled by
John Penn of Greenwich are recorded as the first instance of the application of mass production techniques (though not necessarily the assembly-line method) to marine engineering. In filling an Admiralty order for 90 sets to his high-pressure and high-revolution horizontal
trunk engine design, Penn produced them all in 90 days. He also used
Whitworth Standard threads throughout. Prerequisites for the wide use of mass production were
interchangeable parts,
machine tools and
power, especially in the form of
electricity. Some of the organizational management concepts needed to create 20th-century mass production, such as
scientific management, had been pioneered by other engineers (most of whom are not famous, but
Frederick Winslow Taylor is one of the well-known ones), whose work would later be synthesized into fields such as
industrial engineering,
manufacturing engineering,
operations research, and
management consultancy. Although after leaving the
Henry Ford Company which was rebranded as
Cadillac and later was awarded the
Dewar Trophy in 1908 for creating interchangeable mass-produced precision engine parts,
Henry Ford downplayed the role of Taylorism in the development of mass production at his company. However, Ford management performed time studies and experiments to mechanize their factory processes, focusing on minimizing worker movements. The difference is that while Taylor focused mostly on efficiency of the worker, Ford also substituted for labor by using machines, thoughtfully arranged, wherever possible. In 1807,
Eli Terry was hired to produce 4,000 wooden movement clocks in the Porter Contract. At this time, the annual yield for wooden clocks did not exceed a few dozen on average. Terry developed a
milling machine in 1795, in which he perfected
Interchangeable parts. In 1807, Terry developed a spindle cutting machine, which could produce multiple parts at the same time. Terry hired
Silas Hoadley and
Seth Thomas to work the
Assembly line at the facilities. The Porter Contract was the first contract which called for mass production of clock movements in history. In 1815, Terry began mass-producing the first shelf clock.
Chauncey Jerome, an apprentice of Eli Terry mass-produced up to 20,000 brass clocks annually in 1840 when he invented the cheap 30-hour OG clock. The
United States Department of War sponsored the development of interchangeable parts for guns produced at the arsenals at
Springfield, Massachusetts and
Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) in the early decades of the 19th century, finally achieving reliable interchangeability by about 1850. For the ongoing
energy transition, many wind turbine components and solar panels are being mass-produced. Wind turbines and solar panels are being used in respectively
wind farms and
solar farms. In addition, in the ongoing
climate change mitigation,
large-scale carbon sequestration (through
reforestation,
blue carbon restoration, etc) has been proposed. Some projects (such as the
Trillion Tree Campaign) involve planting a very large amount of trees. In order to speed up such efforts, fast propagation of trees may be useful. Some automated machines have been produced to allow for fast (vegetative)
plant propagation.Also, for some plants that help to sequester carbon (such as
seagrass), techniques have been developed to help speed up the process . Mass production benefited from the development of materials such as inexpensive steel, high strength steel and plastics. Machining of metals was greatly enhanced with
high-speed steel and later very hard materials such as
tungsten carbide for cutting edges. Fabrication using steel components was aided by the development of
electric welding and stamped steel parts, both which appeared in industry in about 1890. Plastics such as
polyethylene,
polystyrene and
polyvinyl chloride (PVC) can be easily formed into shapes by
extrusion,
blow molding or
injection molding, resulting in very low cost manufacture of consumer products, plastic piping, containers and parts. An influential article that helped to frame and popularize the 20th century's definition of mass production appeared in a 1926
Encyclopædia Britannica supplement. The article was written based on correspondence with Ford Motor Company and is sometimes credited as the first use of the term.
Factory electrification Electrification of factories began very gradually in the 1890s after the introduction of a practical
DC motor by
Frank J. Sprague and accelerated after the
AC motor was developed by
Galileo Ferraris,
Nikola Tesla and
Westinghouse,
Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and others. Electrification of factories was fastest between 1900 and 1930, aided by the establishment of electric utilities with central stations and the lowering of electricity prices from 1914 to 1917. Electric motors were several times more efficient than small steam engines because central station generation were more efficient than small steam engines and because
line shafts and belts had high friction losses. Electric motors also allowed more flexibility in manufacturing and required less maintenance than line shafts and belts. Many factories saw a 30% increase in output simply from changing over to electric motors. Electrification enabled modern mass production, as with Thomas Edison's iron ore processing plant (about 1893) that could process 20,000 tons of ore per day with two shifts, each of five men. At that time it was still common to handle bulk materials with shovels, wheelbarrows and small narrow-gauge rail cars, and for comparison, a canal digger in previous decades typically handled five tons per 12-hour day. The biggest impact of early mass production was in manufacturing everyday items, such as at the
Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company, which electrified its
mason jar plant in
Muncie, Indiana, U.S., around 1900. The new automated process used glass-blowing machines to replace 210 craftsman glass blowers and helpers. A small electric truck was used to handle 150 dozen bottles at a time where previously a hand truck would carry six dozen. Electric mixers replaced men with shovels handling sand and other ingredients that were fed into the glass furnace. An electric overhead crane replaced 36
day laborers for moving heavy loads across the factory. According to
Henry Ford: The provision of a whole new system of electric generation emancipated industry from the leather belt and
line shaft, for it eventually became possible to provide each tool with its own electric motor. This may seem only a detail of minor importance. In fact, modern industry could not be carried out with the belt and line shaft for a number of reasons. The motor enabled machinery to be arranged in the order of the work, and that alone has probably doubled the efficiency of industry, for it has cut out a tremendous amount of useless handling and hauling. The belt and
line shaft were also tremendously wasteful – so wasteful indeed that no factory could be really large, for even the longest line shaft was small according to modern requirements. Also high speed tools were impossible under the old conditions – neither the pulleys nor the belts could stand modern speeds. Without high speed tools and the finer steels which they brought about, there could be nothing of what we call modern industry. at both sides of photo near top. Mass production was popularized in the late 1910s and 1920s by Henry Ford's
Ford Motor Company, which introduced electric motors to the then-well-known technique of chain or sequential production. Ford also bought or designed and built special purpose machine tools and fixtures such as multiple spindle
drill presses that could drill every hole on one side of an engine block in one operation and a multiple head
milling machine that could simultaneously machine 15 engine blocks held on a single fixture. All of these machine tools were arranged systematically in the production flow and some had special carriages for rolling heavy items into machining position. Production of the
Ford Model T used 32,000 machine tools.
Buildings The process of prefabrication, wherein parts are created separately from the finished product, is at the core of all mass-produced construction. Early examples include movable structures reportedly utilized by
Akbar the Great, and the
chattel houses built by emancipated slaves on
Barbados. The
Nissen hut, first used by the British during
World War I, married prefabrication and mass production in a way that suited the needs of the military. The simple structures, which cost little and could be erected in just a couple of hours, were highly successful: over 100,000 Nissen huts were produced during World War I alone, and they would go on to serve in other conflicts and inspire a number of similar designs. Following World War II, in the United States,
William Levitt pioneered the building of standardized
tract houses in 56 different locations around the country. These communities were dubbed
Levittowns, and they were able to be constructed quickly and cheaply through the leveraging of
economies of scale, as well as the specialization of construction tasks in a process akin to an assembly line. This era also saw the invention of the
mobile home, a small prefabricated house that can be transported cheaply on a truck bed. In the modern industrialization of construction, mass production is often used for prefabrication of house components.
Fabrics and materials Mass production has significantly impacted the fashion industry, particularly in the realm of fibers and materials. The advent of synthetic fibers, such as polyester and nylon, revolutionized textile manufacturing by providing cost-effective alternatives to natural fibers. This shift enabled the rapid production of inexpensive clothing, contributing to the rise of fast fashion. This reliance on mass production has raised concerns about environmental sustainability and labor conditions, spurring the need for greater ethical and sustainable practices within the fashion industry. ==The use of assembly lines==