Abandoned Factory

The old grey walls, rust marks bleeding down to the floor, vibrate like an enormous echo chamber activated by some mysterious, ominous sound that seems to come from every direction. You stand still, closing your eyes, hoping the strangeness of this experience is just a figment of your imagination, and that when you open your eyes everything will be sunny and safe again. A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production. Typically, factories gather and concentrate resources: laborers, capital and plant. The oldest known production facility that might be called a factory was discovered at Blombos Cave, a cave on the south coast of South Africa some 200 miles (320 km) east of Cape Town, where 100,000-year-old tools and ingredients were found with which early modern humans mixed an ochre-based paint. Although large mills and workshops were established in ancient China, Rome and the Middle East, the Venice Arsenal 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.