Factory

XVIII — XIX centuries

The first branch, massively switched from manufactory to factory production, was English light industry of the late 18th - early 19th centuries. The key innovations were Watt's steam engine (1764), Hargriv's spinning machine (1770), Cartwright's mechanical weaving machine with foot drive (1785), thanks to which almost the entire industry switched to mass production with a high level of mechanization. The world's first spinning mill is considered to be a factory in Cromford , built in 1772-1775 according to the Arkwright system; it was arranged in the form of a longitudinal series of interconnected capital workshop structures along a cliff near the river, around which subsequently a complex of residential buildings for workers and office buildings, a system of transitions and aqueducts developed, and subsequently a large structure appeared next to it in the Derwent Valley whole group of factories . Soon, weaving mills appeared along rivers and canals throughout England, and only spinning mills in England in 1790 numbered about one and a half hundred, 700-800 workers worked on each of them ^[4] .

An important milestone in the differentiation of factories from the early forms of production organization was the understanding of the concepts of division of labor ( Adam Smith , 1770s) and interchangeability ( Eli Whitney , 1790s). Although the division of labor was also characteristic of large manufactories, the systems of machines and workshops in factories were initially created with the division of functions and operations, so the division of labor into them became a natural technical necessity ^[5] . The penetration of the ideas of interchangeability in turn contributed to the simplification of operations, expanding the range of possible suppliers of raw materials and semi-finished products , standardizing products, and, ultimately, increasing mass production while reducing costs ^[6] .

In the first half of the 19th century, mechanization of labor swept mechanical engineering and manufacturing industries - steam hammers , turning and milling machines appeared, ceramic and glass production took on factory forms, due to the growing needs of rapidly developing plants and factories, a new industry was born - chemical , plants which produced sulfuric acid and soda ash on an industrial scale. Large factories and plants sprang up all over the world, from Western Europe to the Russian Empire and the USA .

XX century

The intensification of production in factories in the first decades of the 20th century is associated with electrification , which made it possible to mass produce aluminum , chlorine , sodium hydroxide on a massive scale by electrochemical reactions , and with the advent of electric motors it became possible to create production lines and create conveyor production . The invention of voltage regulators allowed us to move from mechanization to automation of production , which began in the 1920s - 1930s, and became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. Projects of plants and factories increasingly began to depend on the chosen production scheme, typical examples were concrete tower plants and the Soviet ring baking scheme of the 1930s by George Marsakov , which determined the cylindrical shape of a series of bakeries in Moscow and Leningrad ^[7] . If the most important criterion for choosing the location of the first factories was the proximity to water and the availability of labor resources, then in the XX century the proximity to generating capacities and sources of raw materials became decisive. With an increase in the concentration of plants and factories, united by a common technological process, tendencies of vertical integration became widespread when groups of plants and factories were combined into combines under the management of vertically integrated holdings.

In the 1970s and 1990s, due to various factors, deindustrialization processes were noted in some sectors and regions, leading to the closure of factories, their abandonment or conversion to non-core premises, and in some cases to demographic changes in the region. A striking example is the decline of the American “ rust belt, ” in which a significant number of steel and machine-building plants have traditionally been concentrated. Gentrification has become another phenomenon of the late XX - early XXI centuries, crowding factories out of cities: the profitability of traditional industrial production has become relatively small compared to the non-industrial use of sites and premises located in the centers of large megacities . Moreover, if buildings that had previously lost their industrial purpose were often demolished, at the end of the 20th century there was a tendency to preserve factory buildings, their reconstruction (renovation) and the installation of office-trade and exhibition centers, hotels, residential premises in them, in connection with this a special architectural style was formed loft .

The structure of plants and factories varies significantly depending on the industry, region, and the chosen production scheme, but, as a rule, has a number of common features that distinguish them from other forms of production enterprises. The main distinguishing feature is the workshop device, with the allocation of one or more mechanized or automated workshops of the main industries in which the main flow of product creation is carried out, and auxiliary shops and sections intended for supporting operations - tooling , repair and maintenance of main production machines, supply energy, water, gas, steam. In addition, factories may have workshops engaged in secondary production, for example, from waste from primary production. As a rule, in factories, in addition to workshops, there is also a general economic unit, which includes various kinds of warehouses , transport columns, units serving access roads, and sanitary infrastructure. In many industries, laboratory units also play an important role in plants and factories, which control raw materials, products, and waste. As a rule, plants and factories have canteens , domestic premises for workers, and large enterprises have a medical unit and polyclinics , and in large factories and factories that are far from cities, dormitories and houses for workers, kindergartens and schools are also included in the territorial production complex. dispensaries and leisure clubs .

One of the tasks of designing a factory device is to ensure an efficient production process due to the rational placement of buildings, structures, workshops and premises, while factors such as ensuring the directness of objects of labor when moving from one unit to another without oncoming flows, reducing the length of energy communications, non-intersection of walking routes of workers with transport and communications, the allocation of workshops with a uniform nature of production (hot, cold s, power) and many others ^[8] . The device’s performance indicators are the area of ​​the land plot, the area and volume of premises, the length of communications: the lower these indicators are in relation to the capacity of the enterprise, the factory or plant are considered more efficiently arranged.

An office (formerly an office) in which the managerial staff of a plant or factory is located is usually located in a separate building, and in small factories it can be arranged in a separate room in one of the workshop facilities. The territory of plants and factories is usually fenced, and workers are allowed to enter workplaces through a checkpoint or checkpoint system.

• Pokrovsky V.I. Factory // Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Factory / D. G. Plahotnaya // Frankfurt - Chaga. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1978. - ( Great Soviet Encyclopedia : [in 30 vols.] / Ch. Ed. A. M. Prokhorov ; 1969-1978, vol. 28).
• W. J. Stevenson. Production Management = Production / Operation Management / per. from English Yu. M. Soldeka. - 5th. - M .: Binom, 1999 .-- 928 p. - ISBN 5-7898-0124-6 .