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.
Arkwright was one of these. He had some harsh factory rules such as workers being fined for whistling at work or looking out of the window but he also built homes for his work force, churches and expected his child workers to receive a basic amount of education. Other owners were not so charitable as they believed that the workers at their factories should be grateful for having a job and the comforts built by the likes of Arkwright did not extend elsewhere.
At the time when the Industrial Revolution was at its height, very few laws had been passed by Parliament to protect the workers. Factory inspectors were easily bribed as they were so poorly paid.
Factories rarely kept any records of the ages of children and adults who worked for them. The at-home system, was, however, flawed in some ways, as large-scale production of items was not possible, with different outcomes for the same product.
The latter half of the 18th century saw a shift in this mechanism, with the advent of steam and water power, which were used in the automation of processes applied in the factory system. First used in England in the textile industry, the use of mechanical processes would soon spread to countries such as the United States.
The first factory established in the United States dates back to when Samuel Slater came from England and constructed a factory to produce yarn. Towards the end of the 18th century, the idea of interchangeable parts was introduced by Eli Whitney. The concept, used initially in the firearm industry, ensured that parts of the firearm were manufactured to precise specifications.
Replacement of any part could be carried out using elements from any other gun of the same design and also resulted in reduced production times. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.
In the early s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in similar locomotives started transporting freight and passengers between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. 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.
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