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56-593: Durham Mill and Furnace is a historic grist mill located in Durham Township in Bucks County, Pennsylvania . The mill was built in 1820, on the foundations of Durham Furnace. The furnace was built in 1727 and remained in operation for 70 years. The furnace produced pig and bar iron and during the American Revolution cannons, ballshot, and other military equipment. One of its managers

112-412: A building or set of buildings where large amounts of goods are made using machines elsewhere: ... the utilization of machines presupposes social cooperation and the division of labour The first machine is stated by one source to have been traps used to assist with the capturing of animals, corresponding to the machine as a mechanism operating independently or with very little force by interaction from

168-502: A critical part of modern economic production , with the majority of the world's goods being created or processed within factories. Factories arose with the introduction of machinery during the Industrial Revolution , when the capital and space requirements became too great for cottage industry or workshops. Early factories that contained small amounts of machinery, such as one or two spinning mules , and fewer than

224-481: A date for cooperation and factors of demand, by an increased community size and population to make something like factory level production a conceivable necessity. Archaeologist Bonnet, unearthed the foundations of numerous workshops in the city of Kerma proving that as early as 2000 BC Kerma was a large urban capital. The watermill was first made in the Persian Empire some time before 350 BC. In

280-413: A dozen workers have been called "glorified workshops". Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production. Large factories tend to be located with access to multiple modes of transportation, some having rail , highway and water loading and unloading facilities. In some countries like Australia, it is common to call

336-835: A factory building a " Shed ". Factories may either make discrete products or some type of continuously produced material, such as chemicals , pulp and paper , or refined oil products . Factories manufacturing chemicals are often called plants and may have most of their equipment – tanks , pressure vessels , chemical reactors , pumps and piping – outdoors and operated from control rooms . Oil refineries have most of their equipment outdoors. Discrete products may be final goods , or parts and sub-assemblies which are made into final products elsewhere. Factories may be supplied parts from elsewhere or make them from raw materials . Continuous production industries typically use heat or electricity to transform streams of raw materials into finished products. The term mill originally referred to

392-425: A human, with a capacity for use repeatedly with operation exactly the same on every occasion of functioning. The wheel was invented c.  3000 BC , the spoked wheel c.  2000 BC . The Iron Age began approximately 1200–1000 BC. However, other sources define machinery as a means of production. Archaeology provides a date for the earliest city as 5000 BC as Tell Brak (Ur et al. 2006), therefore

448-413: A husk. This foundation isolated the building from vibrations coming from the stones and main gearing and also allowed for the easy re-leveling of the foundation to keep the millstones perfectly horizontal. The lower bedstone was placed in an inset in the husk with the upper runner stone above the level of the husk. American inventor Oliver Evans revolutionized the labor-intensive process of early mills at

504-412: A mechanical sieve to refine the flour, or turning a wooden drum to wind up a chain used to hoist sacks of grain to the top of the mill house. The distance between the stones can be varied to produce the grade of flour required; moving the stones closer together produces finer flour. This process, which may be automatic or controlled by the miller, is called tentering . The grain is lifted in sacks onto

560-606: A meeting of the Friends Historical Association of Philadelphia, 10 June 1922 (Holicong, PA: Buckingham Friends Meeting House, 1937). [REDACTED] Media related to Durham Mill and Furnace at Wikimedia Commons Grist mill The Greek geographer Strabo reports in his Geography a water-powered grain-mill to have existed near the palace of king Mithradates VI Eupator at Cabira , Asia Minor , before 71 BC. The early mills had horizontal paddle wheels, an arrangement which later became known as

616-535: A more contemporary approach to handle design applicable to manufacturing facilities can be found in Socio-Technical Systems (STS) . In Britain, a shadow factory is one of a number of manufacturing sites built in dispersed locations in times of war to reduce the risk of disruption due to enemy air-raids and often with the dual purpose of increasing manufacturing capacity. Before World War II Britain had built many shadow factories . Production of

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672-586: A percentage called the "miller's toll". Early mills in England were almost always built by the local lord of the manor and had the exclusive right (the right of mulcture ) to a proportion on all grain processed in the community. Later, mills were supported by farming communities and the miller received the "miller's toll" in lieu of wages. Most towns and villages had their own mill so that local farmers could easily transport their grain there to be milled. These communities were dependent on their local mill as bread

728-641: A rate sufficient to meet the needs of 80,000 persons, in the Roman Empire. The large population increase in medieval Islamic cities, such as Baghdad 's 1.5 million population, led to the development of large-scale factory milling installations with higher productivity to feed and support the large growing population. A tenth-century grain-processing factory in the Egyptian town of Bilbays , for example, milled an estimated 300 tons of grain and flour per day. Both watermills and windmills were widely used in

784-434: A system that allows the sequential milling of these grists, noting that "a mill, thus constructed, might grind grists in the day time, and do merchant-work at night." Over time, any small, older style flour mill became generally known as a gristmill (as a distinction from large factory flour mills). Modern mills typically use electricity or fossil fuels to spin heavy steel, or cast iron, serrated and flat rollers to separate

840-615: Is probably the Barbegal aqueduct and mill where water with a 19-metre fall drove sixteen water wheels , giving a grinding capacity estimated at 28 tons per day. Water mills seem to have remained in use during the post-Roman period. Manually operated mills utilizing a crank-and-connecting rod were used in the Western Han dynasty . There was an expansion of grist-milling in the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia from

896-755: The Ebro River in Spain is associated with the Real Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Rueda , built by the Cistercian monks in 1202. The Cistercians were known for their use of this technology in Western Europe in the period 1100 to 1350. Although the terms "gristmill" or "corn mill" can refer to any mill that grinds grain, the terms were used historically for a local mill where farmers brought their own grain and received ground meal or flour, minus

952-483: The Roman Empire by the end of the first century BC, and these were described by Vitruvius . The rotating mill is considered "one of the greatest discoveries of the human race". It was a very physically demanding job for workers, where the slave workers were considered little different from animals, the miseries of which were depicted in iconography and Apuleius ' The Golden Ass . The peak of Roman technology

1008-496: The Supermarine Spitfire at its parent company's base at Woolston, Southampton was vulnerable to enemy attack as a high-profile target and was well within range of Luftwaffe bombers. Indeed, on 26 September 1940 this facility was completely destroyed by an enemy bombing raid. Supermarine had already established a plant at Castle Bromwich ; this action prompted them to further disperse Spitfire production around

1064-438: The bran and germ from the endosperm . The endosperm is ground to create white flour, which may be recombined with the bran and germ to create whole grain or graham flour . The different milling techniques produce visibly different results, but can be made to produce nutritionally and functionally equivalent output. Stone-ground flour is preferred by many bakers and natural food advocates because of its texture, nutty flavour, and

1120-444: The factory system ) developed in the cotton and wool textiles industry. Later generations of factories included mechanized shoe production and manufacturing of machinery, including machine tools. After this came factories that supplied the railroad industry included rolling mills, foundries and locomotive works, along with agricultural-equipment factories that produced cast-steel plows and reapers. Bicycles were mass-produced beginning in

1176-484: The milling of grain , which usually used natural resources such as water or wind power until those were displaced by steam power in the 19th century. Because many processes like spinning and weaving, iron rolling , and paper manufacturing were originally powered by water, the term survives as in steel mill , paper mill , etc. Max Weber considered production during ancient and medieval times as never warranting classification as factories, with methods of production and

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1232-413: The sack floor at the top of the mill on the hoist . The sacks are then emptied into bins, where the grain falls down through a hopper to the millstones on the stone floor below. The flow of grain is regulated by shaking it in a gently sloping trough (the slipper ) from which it falls into a hole in the center of the runner stone. The milled grain (flour) is collected as it emerges through the grooves in

1288-488: The " Norse wheel ", as many were found in Scandinavia. The paddle wheel was attached to a shaft which was, in turn, attached to the centre of the millstone called the "runner stone". The turning force produced by the water on the paddles was transferred directly to the runner stone, causing it to grind against a stationary " bed ", a stone of a similar size and shape. This simple arrangement required no gears , but had

1344-451: The 1880s. The Nasmyth, Gaskell and Company's Bridgewater Foundry , which began operation in 1836, was one of the earliest factories to use modern materials handling such as cranes and rail tracks through the buildings for handling heavy items. Large scale electrification of factories began around 1900 after the development of the AC motor which was able to run at constant speed depending on

1400-543: The 3rd century AD onwards, and then the widespread expansion of large-scale factory milling installations across the Islamic world from the 8th century onwards. Geared gristmills were built in the medieval Near East and North Africa , which were used for grinding grain and other seeds to produce meals . Gristmills in the Islamic world were powered by both water and wind. The first wind-powered gristmills were built in

1456-592: The 9th and 10th centuries in what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The Egyptian town of Bilbays had a grain-processing factory that produced an estimated 300 tons of flour and grain per day. From the late 10th century onwards, there was an expansion of grist-milling in Northern Europe. In England, the Domesday survey of 1086 gives a precise count of England's water-powered flour mills: there were 5,624, or about one for every 300 inhabitants, and this

1512-450: The Egyptian pharaoh, with slave employment and no differentiation of skills within the slave group comparable to modern definitions as division of labour . According to translations of Demosthenes and Herodotus, Naucratis was a, or the only, factory in the entirety of ancient Egypt . A source of 1983 (Hopkins), states the largest factory production in ancient times was of 120 slaves within fourth century BC Athens. An article within

1568-494: The Islamic world at the time. The Venice Arsenal also provides one of the first examples of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in Venice , Republic of Venice , several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution , it mass-produced ships on assembly lines using manufactured parts . The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people. One of

1624-472: The New York Times article dated 13 October 2011 states: "In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory" – (John Noble Wilford) ... discovered at Blombos Cave , a cave on the south coast of South Africa where 100,000-year-old tools and ingredients were found with which early modern humans mixed an ochre -based paint . Although The Cambridge Online Dictionary definition of factory states:

1680-399: The area. The factory system was a new way of organizing workforce made necessary by the development of machines which were too large to house in a worker's cottage. Working hours were as long as they had been for the farmer, that is, from dawn to dusk, six days per week. Overall, this practice essentially reduced skilled and unskilled workers to replaceable commodities. Arkwright's factory was

1736-901: The belief that it is nutritionally superior and has a better baking quality than steel-roller-milled flour. It is claimed that, as the stones grind relatively slowly, the wheat germ is not exposed to the sort of excessive temperatures that could cause the fat from the germ portion to oxidize and become rancid, which would destroy some of the vitamin content. Stone-milled flour has been found to be relatively high in thiamin, compared to roller-milled flour, especially when milled from hard wheat. Gristmills only grind "clean" grains from which stalks and chaff have previously been removed, but historically some mills also housed equipment for threshing , sorting, and cleaning prior to grinding. Modern mills are usually "merchant mills" that are either privately owned and accept money or trade for milling grains or are owned by corporations that buy unmilled grain and then own

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1792-408: The contemporary economic situation incomparable to modern or even pre-modern developments of industry. In ancient times, the earliest production limited to the household, developed into a separate endeavor independent to the place of inhabitation with production at that time only beginning to be characteristic of industry, termed as "unfree shop industry", a situation caused especially under the reign of

1848-436: The disadvantage that the speed of rotation of the stone was dependent on the volume and flow of water available and was, therefore, only suitable for use in mountainous regions with fast-flowing streams. This dependence on the volume and speed of flow of the water also meant that the speed of rotation of the stone was highly variable and the optimum grinding speed could not always be maintained. Vertical wheels were in use in

1904-534: The earliest factories was John Lombe 's water-powered silk mill at Derby , operational by 1721. By 1746, an integrated brass mill was working at Warmley near Bristol . Raw material went in at one end, was smelted into brass and was turned into pans, pins, wire, and other goods. Housing was provided for workers on site. Josiah Wedgwood in Staffordshire and Matthew Boulton at his Soho Manufactory were other prominent early industrialists, who employed

1960-654: The end of the eighteenth century when he automated the process of making flour. His inventions included the Elevator, wood or tin buckets on a vertical endless leather belt, used to move grain and flour vertically upward; the Conveyor, a wooden auger to move material horizontally; the Hopper Boy, a device for stirring and cooling the newly ground flour; the Drill, a horizontal elevator with flaps instead of buckets (similar to

2016-566: The factory concept in the early 20th century, with the innovation of the mass production . Highly specialized laborers situated alongside a series of rolling ramps would build up a product such as (in Ford's case) an automobile . This concept dramatically decreased production costs for virtually all manufactured goods and brought about the age of consumerism . In the mid - to late 20th century, industrialized countries introduced next-generation factories with two improvements: Some speculation as to

2072-467: The factory system. The factory system began widespread use somewhat later when cotton spinning was mechanized. Richard Arkwright is the person credited with inventing the prototype of the modern factory. After he patented his water frame in 1769, he established Cromford Mill , in Derbyshire , England, significantly expanding the village of Cromford to accommodate the migrant workers new to

2128-427: The first successful cotton spinning factory in the world; it showed unequivocally the way ahead for industry and was widely copied. Between 1770 and 1850 mechanized factories supplanted traditional artisan shops as the predominant form of manufacturing institution, because the larger-scale factories enjoyed a significant technological and supervision advantage over the small artisan shops. The earliest factories (using

2184-546: The flour produced. One common pest found in flour mills is the Mediterranean flour moth . Moth larvae produce a web-like material that clogs machinery, sometimes causing grain mills to shut down. Factory A factory , manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery , where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. They are

2240-458: The focus of labour, in general, shifted to central-city office towers or to semi-rural campus-style establishments, and many factories stood deserted in local rust belts . The next blow to the traditional factories came from globalization . Manufacturing processes (or their logical successors, assembly plants) in the late 20th century re-focussed in many instances on Special Economic Zones in developing countries or on maquiladoras just across

2296-429: The form of a kind of "laboratory factories", with management models that allow "producing with quality while experimenting to do it better tomorrow". Before the advent of mass transportation , factories' needs for ever-greater concentrations of labourers meant that they typically grew up in an urban setting or fostered their own urbanization . Industrial slums developed, and reinforced their own development through

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2352-458: The future of the factory includes scenarios with rapid prototyping , nanotechnology , and orbital zero- gravity facilities. There is some scepticism about the development of the factories of the future if the robotic industry is not matched by a higher technological level of the people who operate it. According to some authors, the four basic pillars of the factories of the future are strategy, technology, people and habitability, which would take

2408-510: The interactions between factories, as when one factory's output or waste-product became the raw materials of another factory (preferably nearby). Canals and railways grew as factories spread, each clustering around sources of cheap energy, available materials and/or mass markets. The exception proved the rule: even greenfield factory sites such as Bournville , founded in a rural setting, developed their own housing and profited from convenient communications systems. Regulation curbed some of

2464-465: The national boundaries of industrialized states. Further re-location to the least industrialized nations appears possible as the benefits of out-sourcing and the lessons of flexible location apply in the future. Much of management theory developed in response to the need to control factory processes. Assumptions on the hierarchies of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled laborers and their supervisors and managers still linger on; however an example of

2520-429: The number of poles and the current electrical frequency. At first larger motors were added to line shafts , but as soon as small horsepower motors became widely available, factories switched to unit drive. Eliminating line shafts freed factories of layout constraints and allowed factory layout to be more efficient. Electrification enabled sequential automation using relay logic . Henry Ford further revolutionized

2576-496: The old wheel mills. In most wheel-driven mills, a large gear-wheel called the pit wheel is mounted on the same axle as the water wheel and this drives a smaller gear-wheel, the wallower , on a main driveshaft running vertically from the bottom to the top of the building. This system of gearing ensures that the main shaft turns faster than the water wheel, which typically rotates at around 10 rpm . The millstones themselves turn at around 120 rpm . They are laid one on top of

2632-414: The other. The bottom stone, called the bed , is fixed to the floor, while the top stone, the runner , is mounted on a separate spindle, driven by the main shaft. A wheel called the stone nut connects the runner's spindle to the main shaft, and this can be moved out of the way to disconnect the stone and stop it turning, leaving the main shaft turning to drive other machinery. This might include driving

2688-418: The process. Evans himself did not use the term gristmill to describe his automatic flour mill, which was purpose designed as a merchant mill (he used the more general term "water-mill"). In his book his only reference to "grist" (or "grists") is to the small batches of grain a farmer would bring in to have ground for himself (what would be generally called barter or custom milling). In his book, Evans describes

2744-416: The runner stone from the outer rim of the stones and is fed down a chute to be collected in sacks on the ground or meal floor. A similar process is used for grains such as wheat to make flour, and for maize to make corn meal . In order to prevent vibrations from the millstones shaking the building apart, they were usually placed on a separate timber foundation, not attached to the mill walls, known as

2800-406: The third century BC, Philo of Byzantium describes a water-driven wheel in his technical treatises. Factories producing garum were common in the Roman Empire . The Barbegal aqueduct and mills are an industrial complex from the second century AD found in southern France. By the time of the fourth century AD, there was a water-milling installation with a capacity to grind 28 tons of grain per day,

2856-605: The use of a conveyor but easier to build); and the Descender, an endless strap (leather or flannel) in a trough that is angled downward, the strap helps to move the ground flour in the trough. Most importantly, he integrated these into a single continuous process, the overall design later becoming known as the Automatic (or Automated) mill. In 1790 he received the third Federal patent for his process. In 1795 he published "The Young Mill-Wright and Miller’s Guide" which fully described

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2912-523: The worst excesses of industrialization 's factory-based society, labourers of Factory Acts leading the way in Britain. Trams , automobiles and town planning encouraged the separate development of industrial suburbs and residential suburbs, with labourers commuting between them. Though factories dominated the Industrial Era, the growth in the service sector eventually began to dethrone them:

2968-609: Was Col. George Taylor (c. 1716–1781), a signer of the Declaration of Independence . The mill building is a three-story, stone structure with the overshot wheel located inside. Attached to it is a large, brick gambrel roofed warehouse added in 1912. At that time, the post office opened at the mill, the second oldest post office in the United States; the Durham Post Office was founded in 1723. The furnace

3024-522: Was a staple part of the diet. Classical mill designs are usually water-powered , though some are powered by the wind or by livestock. In a watermill a sluice gate is opened to allow water to flow onto, or under, a water wheel to make it turn. In most watermills the water wheel was mounted vertically, i.e., edge-on, in the water, but in some cases horizontally (the tub wheel and so-called Norse wheel ). Later designs incorporated horizontal steel or cast iron turbines and these were sometimes refitted into

3080-487: Was owned by George P. Whitaker and Joseph Whitaker in the mid 19th-century. The mill was owned by Congressman Reuben Knecht Bachman (1834–1911) in the late-19th and early-20th century. The mill remained in commercial operation until 1967. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. See Benjamin F. Fackenthal, The Durham Iron Works: Durham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania read at

3136-527: Was probably typical throughout western and southern Europe. From this time onward, water wheels began to be used for purposes other than grist milling. In England, the number of mills in operation followed population growth, and peaked at around 17,000 by 1300. Limited extant examples of gristmills can be found in Europe from the High Middle Ages . An extant well-preserved waterwheel and gristmill on

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