This early factory was established by the toy manufacturer Matthew Boulton and his business partner John Fothergill. In , they leased a site on Handsworth Heath, containing a cottage and a water-driven metal-rolling mill. The mill was replaced by a new factory, designed and built by the Wyatt family of Lichfield, and completed in Between the s and , the nature of work transitioned from a craft production model to a factory-centric model.
Handloom weavers worked at their own pace, with their own tools, and within their own cottages. Factories set hours of work and the machinery within them shaped the pace of work. Factories brought workers together within one building to work on machinery that they did not own. They also increased the division of labor, narrowing the number and scope of tasks. The work-discipline was forcefully instilled upon the workforce by the factory owners.
The early textile factories employed many children. In England and Scotland in , two-thirds of the workers in water-powered cotton mills were children. Sir Robert Peel, a mill owner turned reformer, promoted the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, which was intended to prevent pauper children from working more than 12 hours a day in mills.
Children started in the mills at around the age of four, working as mule scavengers under the working machinery until they were eight. They progressed to working as little piecers until they were During this time they worked 14 to 16 hours a day, often physically abused. About half of workers in Manchester and Stockport cotton factories surveyed in and bagan work at under ten years of age.
Most of the adult workers in cotton factories in midth-century Britain started as child laborers. The growth of this experienced adult factory workforce helps to account for the shift away from child labor in textile factories. While child labor was common on farms and under the putting-out system, historians agree that the impact of the factory system and the Industrial Revolution on children was damaging.
In the industrial districts, children tended to enter the workforce at younger ages. Child laborers tended to be orphans, children of widows, or from the poorest families. Cruelty and torture was enacted on children by master-manufacturers to maintain high output or keep them awake. Prior to the development of the factory system, in the traditional marriage of the laboring class, women would marry men of the same social status and marriage outside this norm was unusual. Marriage during the Industrial Revolution shifted from this tradition to a more sociable union between wife and husband in the laboring class.
Women and men tended to marry someone from the same job, geographical location, or social group. The traditional work sphere was still dictated by the father, who controlled the pace of work for his family.
However, factories and mills undermined the old patriarchal authority. Factories put husbands, wives, and children under the same conditions and authority of the manufacturer masters.
Factory workers typically lived within walking distance to work until the introduction of bicycles and electric street railways in the s. The use of interchangeable parts was quickly followed by the continuous flow process, or assembly line. In a continuous flow process, workers remain at fixed points while mechanized systems move work between workstations. Industries such as petroleum refining, chemical production, and agricultural processing began to utilize this strategy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Henry Ford combined the use of interchangeable parts with continuous-flow production using an assembly line. Some workers felt less satisfied performing the same task repeatedly for an entire day. The automobile industry continued to refine production processes after the world wars. Detroit-type automation used automatic work transfer and positioning devices to allow machines to do work automatically and successively, vastly increasing the volume of identical parts a factory could produce.
Meanwhile, factories began replacing steam power with electricity. This provided more flexibility in the way machines in a factory could be arranged and therefore increased efficiency. Advances in production processes during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to further changes in factory management.
The foreman-based systems of the earlier nineteenth century were not effective for managing the new processes being used in factories. Firms began using a shop ticket system, in which tickets indicated which departments an order needed to pass through and what parts would be used to assemble it.
Foremen were now unnecessary for coordinating work. The ticket system also gave plant managers a way to evaluate the efficiency of processes and workers. In order to motivate workers to use these new systems and exert strong effort, many managers adopted profit-sharing plans. Edited by Joel Mokyr. Oxford University Press, Accessed October 1, Hause, Steven C. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, The West: Encounters and Transformations. Reese, Ty M. Elvira, Andres. Lamphier and Rosanne Welch. Rosenberg, Chaim M.
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Before the Factory System Before urbanization and industrialization, most production was accomplished by a system called the cottage industry.
The Rise of the Factory System The rise of the factory system was a defining aspect of the Industrial Revolution , which took place in England between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. Technological Developments The spinning jenny, the mule, and the power loom significantly decreased production time, allowing Britain to ultimately produce times more cotton cloth. Organization in Early Factories Over time, factories have altered the standard organization of their workers in order to adapt to new approaches to manufacturing.
Problems with the Factory System Many contemporaries criticized early factories, particularly in Britain. Continuing Development of the Factory System By the end of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, the factory system was well-established in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, although in some areas factories continued to operate alongside small-scale forms of production.
The Rise of Fordism Henry Ford combined the use of interchangeable parts with continuous-flow production using an assembly line. Factory System Lowell System. American Fur Company November 8, Technology in the Industrial Revolution: So What? August 24, In , British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Banks and industrial financiers rose to new prominent during the period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers.
A stock exchange was established in London in the s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early s. In , Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith , who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.
Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades.
This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water. Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious and sometimes dangerous , and many workers were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.
In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions , as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.
The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.
By the early 20th century, the U. Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex.
On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history. Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.
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