Short answers, pulled from the story.
The factory system is a method of manufacturing in which workers and machinery are centralized in a factory, work is supervised through division of labor, and production is mechanized. It replaced the putting-out system, also called the domestic system, in which raw materials were sent to home workers who processed them and returned the goods to a central merchant.
The factory system was first adopted in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. One of the earliest factories was John Lombe's water-powered silk mill at Derby, operational by 1721. Richard Arkwright established Cromford Mill in Derbyshire after patenting his water frame in 1769.
Mass production using interchangeable parts was first achieved in 1803 by Marc Isambard Brunel, Henry Maudslay, and Simon Goodrich at Portsmouth Block Mills, supplying the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. By 1808, annual output there had reached 130,000 sailing blocks. The technique was slow to spread in British manufacturing and eventually returned to Britain as an import from America, where it became known as the American system of manufacturing.
Child labor became deeply embedded in the factory system during the early nineteenth century, when schooling was not compulsory and children's wages were a financial necessity for many families. Samuel Slater, who lived from 1768 to 1835, employed children but was required to provide basic education. Automation in the late nineteenth century, particularly the automatic glass-bottle blowing machine developed around 1890, is credited by some with doing more to end child labor than legislation.
Robert Owen, who lived from 1771 to 1858, was an industrialist who became one of the earliest reformers to improve factory and living conditions for workers. He is best known for his work at the New Lanark mills and is regarded as one of the key thinkers of the early socialist movement.
Friedrich Engels wrote about factory workers' living conditions in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, one of the best-known accounts of industrialization's human cost. By the late 1880s, Engels revisited the subject and noted that the extreme poverty and lack of sanitation he had documented in 1844 had largely disappeared.