How Manufacturing Will Work in the Year 2000
Excerpt
Chapter One: How Manufacturing Will Work
Chaos, Pain, and Transformation
When Francis Cabot Lowell, through a supreme act of industrial espionage, memorized the guts of the English power loom systems he had seen in 1811 on an extended stay in Great Britain, he launched a two-hundred-year run for American manufacturing. Lowell pulled together all the disparate functions of the textile production process - carding, dyeing, spinning, weaving, bleaching, tasks that had been contracted out to rural farmwives and small shops - and arranged them in sequence in a single site, a new four-story mill on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, the prototype for thousands of factories that followed. The first experiment was successful beyond the incorporators' dreams, a money machine; 200 percent profits fueled more and bigger mills - Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn, and Manchester, New Hampshire's Amoskeag complex, the biggest cotton plant in the world - more innovation, and urban communities of mill workers. The golden era for manufacturing had begun.
A Dedication ... read full excerpt from The Technology Machine: How Manufacturing Will Work in the Year 2020 ebook
