Factory system

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The factory system reshaped how nearly everything in the modern world gets made. At its core is a deceptively simple idea: bring workers and machines together under one roof, divide the work into narrow tasks, and let mechanized power do what human hands once did alone. The questions worth asking are how this came to be, who it served, who it hurt, and why it spread so quickly from a handful of British mills to the entire industrialized world.

  One place to start is Derby, England, in 1721, where John Lombe opened a water-powered silk mill that is counted among the earliest true factories. Before that moment, most manufacturing happened in cottages and small workshops, where skilled craftsmen made goods by hand, one complete article at a time. What followed Lombe's mill was a transformation so sweeping that it drew comparisons, even at the time, to the other great system of organized mass labor in that era: slavery.

  The factory system did not simply change where work happened. It changed what work meant, who could do it, and what a working life looked like. Friedrich Engels walked into English factory towns in 1844 and wrote what became one of the most famous accounts of what industrialization had done to ordinary people. By the late 1880s, he returned and noted that the extreme poverty and lack of sanitation he had documented were largely gone. That arc, from Lombe's silk mill to Engels' revisit, is the story worth following.

• 2. Mechanics of the System

  ›

  Richard Arkwright patented his water frame in 1769, a breakthrough device that made it possible to power textile machinery at a scale no cottage worker could match. Arkwright established Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, England, and in doing so demonstrated why the factory form was almost inevitable once machinery crossed a certain size threshold. The machines were simply too large to house in a worker's cottage.

  The high capital cost of that machinery and those factory buildings meant that only wealthy individuals or corporations could own them. Workers provided their labor; owners provided everything else, including raw materials, management, administration, and the buildings themselves. That split between ownership and labor became one of the defining features of the system.

  Before electrification arrived in the 1910s and 1920s, most workshops that could not afford their own steam engines rented space in power buildings that supplied a centrally-powered line shaft. Steam engines, it turned out, became more efficient as they grew larger, and the smallest practical ones produced around 2 horsepower, more than most small workshops needed. This pushed smaller operations either into factories or out of the market entirely.

  Multi-story factory buildings were common in the early decades, not for any aesthetic reason, but because multiple floors made it easier to transmit power through those line shafts. In large operations like the Baldwin locomotive works, different manufacturing processes occupied different buildings entirely. Foundry and blacksmith work were kept separate for reasons of safety and health, not as an afterthought but as a deliberate design principle.

• 3. Precision and Interchangeable Parts

  ›

  In 1774, John Wilkinson invented a method for boring cannon-barrels that were straight and true every time. That same boring technique was soon adapted to produce piston cylinders for the steam engines of James Watt. The machine was later described as probably the first metal-cutting tool capable of doing large work with anything approaching modern accuracy.

  Mass production using interchangeable parts reached a genuine milestone in 1803, at the Portsmouth Block Mills at Portsmouth Dockyard. Marc Isambard Brunel worked in cooperation with Henry Maudslay and Simon Goodrich, under the management of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham, the Inspector General of Naval Works, to supply the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. By 1808, annual production had reached 130,000 sailing blocks.

  What makes that achievement striking is what happened next: almost nothing. This method of interchangeable manufacture did not spread quickly through British industry. When it finally did take hold in Britain, it arrived as an import from America and became known as the American system of manufacturing, even though it had originated on English soil. The gap between a technical breakthrough and its widespread adoption could stretch for decades.

• 4. Labor, Wages, and Working Hours

  ›

  Working hours in the early factory era were set by a simple precedent: the farmer's day, which ran from dawn to dusk, six days per week. Factory workers inherited that rhythm directly, and until the late nineteenth century it was common to put in twelve hours a day, six days a week.

  Workers were paid either daily wages or by piece work, sometimes in a mix of money, housing, meals, and goods from a company store, an arrangement known as the truck system. Piece work created accounting complications as production volumes rose and each worker's contribution narrowed to a smaller slice of the finished product. When the production line arrived, designed around standard times for each operation in a sequence, piece work largely fell away because workers had to keep pace with the workflow rather than set their own tempo.

  Debate about the morality of these conditions was active and pointed. Women's wages were in many cases not much more than a quarter of what men earned for comparable work. Child labor became deeply embedded in the system. In the early nineteenth century, schooling was not compulsory, and in many families children's earnings were a necessity. Samuel Slater, who lived from 1768 to 1835, employed children in his mills but was required to provide them with at least basic education.

  Automation in the late nineteenth century is credited by some observers with doing more to end child labor than child-labor laws themselves. The automatic glass-bottle blowing machine, developed around 1890, is the specific example most often cited. Years of schooling began climbing sharply from the end of that century onward.

• 5. Social Disruption and Reform

  ›

  A group of English workers called the Luddites formed in the 1810s to protest against industrialization and sometimes resorted to sabotaging factory machinery. They were not acting without precedent. Inventors in the textile industry had faced harassment for decades; John Kay and Samuel Crompton, who lived from 1753 to 1827, both suffered resistance when they developed their devices.

  For the workers displaced from home-based production, the economic pressure was severe. Mechanized goods underpriced cottage-made ones so thoroughly that domestic spinners and weavers could no longer earn enough to justify the effort. Factory workers typically lived within walking distance of their workplace until bicycles and electric street-railways appeared in the 1890s. Before that, proximity to the factory was not a preference but a practical requirement, and large numbers of workers migrated into towns in search of employment. Many mills had to provide dormitories for workers, particularly for girls and women.

  Karl Marx worried that the capitalist structure of the factory system would eventually compress wages down to bare subsistence, a concern he grounded in what he called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Subsistence wages were a real condition in parts of England, not a theoretical projection. The British Agricultural Revolution had been reducing the need for farm labor for more than a century, forcing displaced agricultural workers to sell their labor wherever a buyer existed. The depression of the late 1830s to early 1840s made conditions particularly bad, and the Irish famine of 1845-1850 sent large numbers of Irish immigrants into English and American factories in search of work.

  Robert Owen, who lived from 1771 to 1858, became one of the most prominent industrialists to push back against those conditions. His work improving the lives of workers at the New Lanark mills earned him recognition as a pioneering reformer and, later, as one of the foundational thinkers of the early socialist movement.

• 6. From Ancient Sumer to Global Spread

  ›

  Around 3000 BC, in Ancient Sumer, the Mesopotamian economy began developing a version of the factory system that already featured division of labor. The concept of organizing workers around specialized tasks did not wait for the Industrial Revolution to be invented.

  What the Industrial Revolution provided was machinery powerful enough to make that organization produce at a scale the ancient world could not reach. The factory system was first adopted in Britain in the late eighteenth century, then spread around the world. Along the way it displaced the putting-out system, also called the domestic system, in which raw materials were distributed to home workers who processed them and returned finished or semi-finished goods.

  By 1746, an integrated brass mill was operating at Warmley near Bristol, where raw material entered at one end and emerged as pans, pins, wire, and other goods, with housing provided for workers on site. The first use of a fully integrated cotton system, where fiber came in and was spun, bleached, dyed, and woven into finished cloth, appeared at mills in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, which became known as the Lowell Mills and the Waltham-Lowell system.

  The Nasmyth, Gaskell and Company's Bridgewater Foundry, which began operating in 1836, was among the earliest factories to adopt modern materials-handling, using cranes and rail-tracks inside the buildings to move heavy items. That practical innovation points toward what the factory system continued to absorb: each new technology for moving, lifting, or processing material became another reason to centralize production further rather than distribute it.