Product Code Database
A factory, manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacturing items or operate machines which process each item into another. They are a critical part of modern economic production, with the majority of the world's goods being created or processed within factories.
Factories arose with the introduction of machinery during the Industrial Revolution, when the capital and space requirements became too great for cottage industry or workshops. Early factories that contained small amounts of machinery, such as one or two , and fewer than a dozen workers have been called "glorified workshops".David. S. Landes (1969). 9780521094184, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. ISBN 9780521094184
Most modern factories have large or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production. Large factories tend to be located with access to multiple modes of transportation, some having Rail transport, highway and water loading and unloading facilities. In some countries like Australia, it is common to call a factory building a "Shed".
Factories may either make discrete products or some type of continuously produced material, such as , pulp and paper, or refined oil products. Factories manufacturing chemicals are often called Chemical plant and may have most of their equipment – Storage tank, , , pumps and piping – outdoors and operated from . Oil refinery have most of their equipment outdoors.
Discrete products may be , or parts and sub-assemblies which are made into final products elsewhere. Factories may be supplied parts from elsewhere or make them from . Continuous production industries typically use heat or electricity to transform streams of raw materials into finished products.
The term mill originally referred to the Gristmill, which usually used natural resources such as water or wind power until those were displaced by Steam engine in the 19th century. Because many processes like spinning and weaving, iron rolling, and paper manufacturing were originally powered by water, the term survives as in steel mill, paper mill, etc.
According to translations of Demosthenes and Herodotus, Naucratis was a, or the only, factory in the entirety of ancient Egypt.Demosthenes, Robert Whiston – Demosthenes, Volume 2 Whittaker and Company, 1868 Retrieved 12 July 2012Herodotus, George Rawlinson – History of Herodotus John Murray 1862 Retrieved 12 July 2012(secondary) (E.Hughes ed) Oxford Companion to Philosophy – techne A source of 1983 (Hopkins), states the largest factory production in ancient times was of 120 slaves within fourth century BC Athens.(P Garnsey, K Hopkins, C. R. Whittaker) – Trade in the Ancient Economy University of California Press, 1983 Retrieved 12 July 2012 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.E Bautista Paz, M Ceccarelli, J Echávarri Otero, JL Muñoz Sanz – A Brief Illustrated History of Machines and Mechanisms Springer, 12 May 2010 Retrieved 12 July 2012 The wheel was invented , the spoked wheel . The Iron Age began approximately 1200–1000 BC.JW Humphrey – Ancient Technology Greenwood Publishing Group, 30 September 2006 Retrieved 12 July 2012 WJ Hamblin – Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC: Holy Warriors at the Dawn of History Taylor & Francis, 12 April 2006 Retrieved 12 July 2012 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 in the city of Kerma proving that as early as 2000 BC Kerma was a large urban capital.Grzymski, K. (2008). Book review: The Nubian pharaohs: Black kings on the Nile. American Journal of Archaeology, Online Publications: Book Review. Retrieved from
The watermill was first made in the Persian Empire some time before 350 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.TK Derry, (TI Williams ed) – A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900 Courier Dover Publications, 24 March 1993 Retrieved 12 July 2012 A Pacey – Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History MIT Press, 1 July 1991 Retrieved 12 July 2012 WM Sumner – Cultural development in the Kur River Basin, Iran: an archaeological analysis of settlement patterns University of Pennsylvania., 1972 [12] Retrieved 12 July 2012
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. Both watermills and were widely used in the Islamic world at the time.Adam Lucas (2006), Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology, p. 65, Brill Publishers,
The Venetian 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 production ships on using manufactured parts. The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people.
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 , but as soon as small horsepower motors became widely available, factories switched to unit drive. Eliminating freed factories of layout constraints and allowed factory layout to be more efficient. Electrification enabled sequential automation using relay logic.
In the mid - to late 20th century, industrialized countries introduced next-generation factories with two improvements:
Some speculation as to the future of the factory includes scenarios with rapid prototyping, nanotechnology, and zero-Gravitation 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".Javier Borda, Hombre y Tecnología: 4.0 y más (Man and Technology: 4.0 and beyond) . Sisteplant Publishers, 2018. ISBN 978-84-09-02350-9 (in Spanish)
Regulation curbed some of the worst excesses of industrialization's factory-based society, labourers of Factory Acts leading the way in Britain. , automobiles and Urban planning encouraged the separate development of industrial suburbs and residential suburbs, with labourers commuting between them.
Though factories dominated the Industrial Era, the growth in the service sector eventually began to dethrone them: the focus of labour, in general, shifted to central-city office towers or to semi-rural campus-style establishments, and many factories stood deserted in local Rust Belt.
The next blow to the traditional factories came from globalization. Manufacturing processes (or their logical successors, Assembly line plants) in the late 20th century re-focussed in many instances on Special Economic Zones in developing countries or on just across the national boundaries of industrialized states. Further re-location to the least industrialized nations appears possible as the benefits of outsourcing and the lessons of flexible location apply in the future.
Production of the Supermarine Spitfire at its parent company's base at Woolston, Southampton was vulnerable to enemy attack as a high-profile target and was well within range of Luftwaffe bombers. Indeed, on 26 September 1940 this facility was completely destroyed by an enemy bombing raid. Supermarine had already established a plant at Castle Bromwich; this action prompted them to further disperse Spitfire production around the country with many premises being requisitioned by the British Government.Price 1986, p. 115.
Connected to the Spitfire was production of its equally important Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, Rolls-Royce's main aircraft engine facility was located at Derby, the need for increased output was met by building new factories in Bentley Crewe and Glasgow and using a purpose-built factory of Ford of Britain in Trafford Park Manchester.Pugh 2000, pp. 192-198.
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