Classic Factory

The old airs of industry are stirred to life in this old and forgotten place. Smells of fresh hot grease and sawdust fill the room like the inviting steam that seeps out from your granny's kitchen, calling to the hungry inhabitants of her home to come devour the bodies of the fallen, be they last summer's timber or ancient tyrannosaurus rex, and turn them into the energy that will build a nation. A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building, or more commonly a complex having several buildings, where workers manufacture goods or operate 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.