SPEAKER_01: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_00: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_02: Piedmont, in northwest Italy, is celebrated for its fine wine. But when a young Englishman, John Lombe, travelled there in the early 18th century, he wasn't going to savour a glass of Borolo. His purpose was industrial espionage. Lombe wished to figure out how the Piemonteze spun strong yarn from silkworm silk. Divulging such secrets was illegal, so Lombe snuck into a workshop after dark, sketching the spinning machines by candlelight. In 1717, he took those sketches to Derby, in the heart of England. Local legend has it that the Italians took a terrible revenge on Lombe, sending a woman to assassinate him. Whatever the truth of that, he died suddenly at the age of 29, just a few years after his Italian adventure. While Lombe may have copied Italian secrets, the way he and his older half-brother Thomas used them was completely original. The Lombes were textile dealers, and seeing a shortage of the strong silk yarn called Augezine, they decided to go big. In the centre of Derby, beside the fast-flowing River Derwent, the Lombe brothers built a structure that was to be imitated around the world. A long, slim, five-storey building with plain brick walls cut by a grid of windows. It housed three dozen large machines powered by a seven-metre-high waterwheel. It was a dramatic change in scale, says historian Joshua Freeman. The age of the large factory had begun with a thunderclap. Intellectuals took note. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, came to gaze in wonder at the silk mill. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, begins with a description of a pin factory. Three decades later, William Blake penned his line about dark, satanic mills. Concerns about the conditions in factories have persisted ever since. The round mill, built in 1811, not far from the Derby Silk Mill, was modelled after Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon Prison, a place where you never knew whether you were being watched. The circular design didn't catch on, but the relentless scrutiny of workers did. Critics claimed that factory exploitation was a similar evil to slavery, a shocking claim then and now. After visiting the mills of Manchester in 1832, the novelist Francis Trollope wrote that factory conditions were incomparably more severe than those suffered by plantation slaves. The factory recruiting wagons that toured the rural areas of 1850s Massachusetts, hoping to persuade rosy-cheeked maidens to come to the city to work in the mills, were dubbed the Slavers. Friedrich Engels, whose father owned a Manchester factory, wrote powerfully about the harsh conditions, inspiring his friend Karl Marx. But Marx, in turn, saw hope in the fact that so many workers were concentrated together in one place. They could organise unions, political parties and even revolutions. He was right about the unions and the political parties, but not about the revolutions. Those came not in industrialised societies, but agrarian ones. The Russian revolutionaries weren't slow to embrace the factory. In 1913, Lenin had skewered the stopwatch-driven, micromanaging studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor as, Advances in the extortion of sweat. After the revolution, the stopwatch was in the other hand. Lenin announced, we must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system. In developed economies, the dark, satanic mills gradually gave way to cleaner, more advanced factories. It is the working conditions of factories in developing countries that now attract attention. Economists have tended to believe that badly paid sweatshop jobs beat the alternative of even more extreme poverty in rural areas. And those jobs have certainly been enough to draw workers to fast-growing cities. Manufacturing has long been viewed as the engine of rapid economic development. So what lies next for the factory? History offers several lessons. Factories are getting bigger. The 18th century Derby silk mill employed 300 workers, a radical step at a time when even machine-based labour could take place at home or in a small workshop. The 19th century Manchester factories that had horrified Engels could employ more than a thousand, often women and children. Modern factories in advanced economies are much larger still. Volkswagen's main factory in Wolfsburg, Germany employs over 60,000 workers. That's half the population of the town of Wolfsburg itself. And the Long Hwa Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen, China, better known as Foxconn City, employs at least 230,000 workers and by some estimates 450,000 to make Apple's iPhones and many other products. These are staggering numbers for a single site. The entire McDonald's franchise worldwide employs fewer than 2 million. The increase in scale isn't the only way in which Foxconn City continues the arc of history. There are, as there were in the 1830s, fears for the welfare of workers. In Shenzhen they're dissuaded from suicide by nets designed to catch anyone who leaps from the factory roof. Large strikes are commonplace in China, while the Chinese government in one of history's great ironies cracks down on the young Marxists who try to get the workers unionised. And as in the West many decades before, there is progress. Veteran journalist James Fallows, who has visited 200 Chinese factories, notes that conditions have dramatically improved over time. One thing, however, has changed. Factories used to centralise the production process. Raw materials came in, finished products went out. Components would be made on site or by suppliers close at hand. Charles Babbage, factory enthusiast and Victorian designer of proto computers, pointed out that this saved on the trouble of transporting heavy or fragile objects in the middle of the manufacturing process. But today's production processes are themselves global. Production can be coordinated and monitored without the need for physical proximity, while shipping containers and barcodes streamline the logistics. Modern factories, even behemoths like Foxconn City, adjust steps in a distributed production chain. Components move backwards and forwards across borders in different states of assembly. Foxconn City, for example, doesn't make iPhones. It assembles them using glass and electronics from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and even the USA. Huge factories have long supplied the world. Now the world itself has become the factory. Joshua Freeman's
SPEAKER_00: history of factories is titled Behemoth, a history of the factory and the making of the modern world. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
