Factory
This article is about manufacturing plants. For Andy Warhol's 1960s studio, see The Factory. For the 1980s British record label, see Factory Records. For other uses, see Factory (disambiguation).A
factory (previously
manufactory) or
manufacturing plant is a large
industrial building where workers
manufacture goods or supervise
machines
processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or
warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy
equipment used for
assembly line production.
Archetypally, factories gather and concentrate resources —
workers,
capital and
plant.
Before becoming associated with large-scale manufacturing, the term
factory might refer to:
* a foreign-based
trading station.
Proto-colonies in
West Africa and
India often featured such factories.
* China also had factories, or warehouses, run by factors. These were restricted to a special area in
Canton from
1760 until
1842 under the
Canton System.
* the activity of
factors (mercantile agents).The
Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of
factory as a manufacturing site,
plant or
works back as far as
1618.
The
Venice Arsenal provides the first example of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in
1104 in
Venice,
Italy, 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.
Apart from that, many historians regard
Matthew Boulton's
Soho Manufactory (established in
1761 in
Birmingham) as the first modern factory. (Other claims might be made for
John Lombe's
silk mill in
Derby (
1721), or
Richard Arkwright's
Cromford Mill (
1771)—purpose built to fit the equipment it held and taking the material through the various manufacturing processes.)
British colonies in the late
18th century built factories simply as buildings where a large number of workers gathered to perform hand labor, usually in
textile production. This proved more efficient – for
administration and for the distribution of raw materials to individual workers – than earlier methods of manufacturing such as
cottage industries or the putting-out system.
Cotton mills used inventions such as the
steam engine and the
power loom to pioneer the industrial factory of the
19th century, where precision
machine tools and replaceable parts allowed greater
efficiency and less waste.
Henry Ford further revolutionized the factory concept in the early
20th century, with the innovation of
mass production. Highly specialized workers 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.
Before the advent of
mass transportation, factories' needs for ever-greater concentrations of workers meant that they typically grew up in an urban setting or fostered their own
urbanisation. Industrial
slums developed, and re-enforced their own development through the
interactions between factories, as when one factory's output or waste-product became the raw materials of another factory (preferably nearby).
Canals and
railways grew as factories spread, each
clustering around sources of cheap energy, available materials and/or mass markets. The exception proved the rule: even greenfields factory sites such as
Bournville, founded in a rural setting, developed its own housing and profitted from convenient communications networks.
Regulation curbed some of the worst excesses of
industrialisation's factory-based society, a series of
Factory Acts leading the way in Britain.
Trams, automobiles and
town planning encouraged the separate development ('apartheid') of industrial suburbs and residential suburbs, with workers commuting between them.
Though factories dominated the Industrial Era, the growth in the
service sector eventually began to dethrone them: the locus of work in general shifted to central-city office towers or to semi-rural campus-style establishments, and many factories stood deserted in local
rust belts.
The next blow to the traditional factories came from
globalisation. Manufacturing processes (or their logical successors,
assembly plants) in the late 20th century re-focussed in many instances on
Special Economic Zones in developing countries or on
maquiladoras just across the national boundaries of industrialised states. Further re-location to the least industrialised nations appears possible as the benefits of
out-sourcing and the lessons of flexible location apply in the future.
Much of
management theory developed in response to the need to control factory processes. Assumption of the hierarchies of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers and their supervisors and managers linger on.
*
List of production topics*
Manufacturing*
Factory object*
Recovered factory*
Industrial railway*
Software factory
