Factory

The production of the equally important Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was linked to the Spitfire; Rolls-main Royce's aero engine facility was in Derby, and the need for increased output was met by building new factories in Crewe and Glasgow, as well as using a purpose-built Ford of Britain factory in Trafford Park, Manchester.

As a high-profile target, the production of the Supermarine Spitfire at its parent company's site at Woolston, Southampton, was susceptible to enemy assault and well within range of Luftwaffe bombers. An enemy bombing strike on September 26, 1940, entirely destroyed this factory. Supermarine had already constructed a facility in Castle Bromwich, prompting them to distribute Spitfire manufacturing around the country, with several facilities requisitioned by the British government.

A shadow factory is one of a number of manufacturing sites built in dispersed locations in times of war to reduce the risk of disruption due to enemy air-raids and often with the dual purpose of increasing manufacturing capacity. Before World War II Britain had built many shadow factories.

Much of management theory arose from the necessity to regulate production processes. Assumptions about the hierarchies of unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled laborers, as well as their supervisors and managers, persist; nevertheless, Socio-Technical Systems provides an example of a more current approach to handling design relevant to industrial facilities (STS).

Globalization was the next blow to conventional manufacturers. In the late twentieth century, manufacturing processes (or their logical successors, assembly plants) re-focused in many cases on Special Economic Zones in developing nations or maquiladoras just across national borders of industrialized states. As the benefits of outsourcing and the lessons of flexible placement apply in the future, more re-location to the least industrialized nations looks to be conceivable.

Though factories dominated the Industrial Era, the rise of the service sector finally dethroned them:[verification needed] the concentration of labor migrated to central-city office buildings or semi-rural campus-style facilities, and many factories in local rust belts sat abandoned.

Factory Acts in the United Kingdom led the way in regulating some of the worst excesses of industrialization's factory-based society. Trams, autos, and urban planning all supported the establishment of distinct industrial and residential areas, with workers traveling between them.

Prior to the invention of mass transportation, industries required ever-higher concentrations of laborers, which meant that they either grew up in or encouraged their own urbanization. Industrial slums grew and reinforced their own growth as a result of industry interactions, such as when one factory's output or trash became the raw materials for another factory (preferably nearby). As industries proliferated, canals and railways grew, each concentrating around sources of cheap energy, readily available materials, and/or huge markets. Even greenfield industry sites like Bournville, which were established in a rural location, created their own housing and benefited from handy communications infrastructure.

1. Advanced statistical quality control methods, pioneered by American mathematician William Edwards Deming, who was first neglected by his native nation. Japanese factories have become world leaders in cost-effectiveness and product quality because to quality control.
2. In the late 1970s, industrial robots were brought to the manufacturing floor. Simple chores like fastening a car door may be done swiftly and perfectly 24 hours a day with these computer-controlled welding arms and grippers. This, too, resulted in cost savings and increased efficiency.

Rapid prototyping, nanotechnology, and orbiting zero-gravity facilities are among the possibilities for the factory's future.

With the invention of mass manufacturing, Henry Ford further changed the factory model in the early twentieth century. Highly specialized laborers would construct a product such as a car (in Ford's instance) beside a series of rolling ramps. This notion significantly reduced the cost of production for practically all produced items, ushering in the age of consumerism.

Industrialized nations launched next-generation factories in the mid- to late-twentieth century, with two improvements:

After the invention of the AC motor, which could operate at a constant speed dependent on the number of poles and the current electrical frequency, large-scale electrification of enterprises began about 1900. Larger motors were first installed on line shafts, but as modest horsepower motors became more readily accessible, industries began to use unit drive. Eliminating line shafts liberated manufacturers from layout limitations, allowing for more efficient manufacturing layout. Using relay logic, sequential automation was made possible by electrification.

Because larger-scale factories had a major technological and supervisory advantage over tiny artisan shops, mechanized factories superseded traditional artisan shops as the primary kind of industrial institution between 1770 and 1850. The cotton and wool textile industries were the first to build factories (using the factory system). Mechanized shoe manufacture and machinery manufacturing, including machine tools, were added in later generations of factories. Rolling mills, foundries, and locomotive works, as well as agricultural-equipment companies that made cast-steel plows and reapers, were among the factories that supplied the railroad industry. Beginning in the 1880s, bicycles were mass-produced.

Richard Arkwright is credited with creating the first modern manufacturing prototype. He created Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, England, after patenting his water frame in 1769, greatly enlarging the settlement of Cromford to accommodate the migrant laborers who had recently arrived in the region. The factory system was a new form of organizing the labor, necessitated by the development of machinery too large to fit within a worker's cottage. Working hours were the same as they were for the farmer, i.e., from dawn to dark six days a week. Overall, this strategy reduced skilled and unskilled labor to commodities that could be replaced.

The factory system began widespread use somewhat later when cotton spinning was mechanized.

John Lombe's water-powered silk mill in Derby, which was operational by 1721, was one of the first. Warmley, near Bristol, had an integrated brass mill by 1746. At one end, raw materials were poured in, melted into brass, and then transformed into pans, pins, wire, and other items. On-site housing was provided for the workers. Other early manufacturers who used the factory method were Josiah Wedgwood in Staffordshire and Matthew Boulton at his Soho Manufactory.

The Arsenal of Venice is also one of the earliest instances of a factory in the modern sense. It began mass-producing ships on assembly lines using manufactured parts in 1104 in Venice, Republic of Venice, some hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. The Venice Arsenal reportedly built approximately one ship every day and employed 16,000 people at its peak.

The development of large-scale factory milling installations with higher productivity to feed and support the large growing population 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 grain-processing mill in the Egyptian town of Bilbays, for example, produced 300 tons of grain and flour each day in the 10th century. At the period, both watermills and windmills were commonly employed throughout the Islamic world.

Before 350 BC, the watermill was invented in the Persian Empire. Philo of Byzantium recounts a water-driven wheel in his technical treatises from the third century BC. Garum factories were ubiquitous throughout the Roman Empire. The Barbegal aqueduct and mills are a 2nd century AD industrial complex in southern France. By the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire had a water-milling facility capable of grinding 28 tons of grain per day, enough to feed 80,000 people.