A Beginner's Guide to the Industrial Revolution: Part Three

The third part of A Beginner's Guide to the Industrial Revolution will focus on the factory system. This system replaced the putting-out system as a dominant form of production in Britain and elsewhere during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As you remember, the factory system was able to come about due to Britain's possession of adequate capital, labor, and ingenuity. In this part of A Beginner's Guide to the Industrial Revolution you will learn what the factory system was all about and how it changed lives.

The factory system as its name implies involved factories. A factory is generally a large building that houses machines used in production of a certain product as well as large numbers of laborers used to work those machines. The putting-out system was small-scale, so families were able to spin thread or weave cloth in their houses using small machines. However, new inventions like the spinning jenny and spinning mule were too large to fit in the average rural home. Another problem was power. These large textile machines needed something more than a foot-pedal or team of oxen to operate them. They either needed water power or steam power derived from burning coal. If the machines utilized water power, then the machines needed to be located near a swift-running river. If they required steam power, they needed a large enough building to house both the machines themselves as well as the heating apparatus. Thus, the most obvious solution to these problems was to locate a number of machines in one convenient place in a large structure.