Production and industry
Agriculture, Storage, and the Rise of New Techniques
Agriculture arose gradually and independently in many regions. Granaries, sickles, grindstones, and plows brought surpluses and records, but also inequality and disease.
Technology area
Production and industry
Producing more, with regularity and a division of tasks, is an old problem. Here are the articles on agriculture, storage, ancient engineering, factories, and the technical organization of industrialization, always paying attention to the relationship between technique, labor, and society.
Articles
Production and industry
Machines and Engineering Solutions of Antiquity
Aqueducts, roads, cranes, mills and the Antikythera Mechanism show both the reach and the limits of engineering in the ancient world.
Production and industry
Factories and the Technical Systems of Industrialization
The factory brought machines, power and workers under one roof and one clock, from the spinning mills of Cromford to the assembly lines of the twentieth century.
Milestones
- From c. 10,000 BCE
Agriculture in several regions
Plants and animals were domesticated gradually and independently in different parts of the world, with no single starting date.
Read: Agriculture → - 3rd century BCE – 1st century CE
Ancient hydraulic and mechanical engineering
Pumps, cranes, aqueducts, and precision mechanisms show the reach of classical-antiquity engineering.
Read: Ancient engineering → - 1771
Cromford Mill
Richard Arkwright starts a water-powered spinning mill in England that became a model for other factories.
Read: Factories → - 1913
Moving assembly line
Ford adopts the moving assembly line at Highland Park, in the United States, cutting the production time of the Model T.
Read: Factories →