An insightful history of giant factories

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. By Joshua Freeman. W.W. Norton & Company; 448 pages; $27.95 and £22.

WHEN it was built in 1721 beside the River Derwent, in Britain’s East Midlands, Lombe’s silk mill became something of a tourist attraction. Daniel Defoe, one of its many visitors, described its “vast bulk” as “a curiosity of a very extraordinary nature”. Employing some 300 people, mostly children in ghastly conditions, the mill was not large by modern standards. But it is widely regarded as the first successful mechanised factory, an innovation that over the next 100 years transformed the way people lived and worked.

Lombe’s mill is the natural starting-point for Joshua Freeman’s lively chronicle of the factory, which as the title of his book “Behemoth” implies, concentrates on the largest specimens of their time. Mr Freeman, a historian at Queens College in New York, travels from Britain’s textile mills, which centralised tasks that were previously carried out in homes and small workshops, to monster steel and carmaking factories in 20th-century America, Europe and the Soviet Union. His journey ends in southern China at Foxconn’s city-sized plant, which makes iPhones and other electronic gadgets.

Mr Freeman rolls up his sleeves and delves into the nitty-gritty of manufacturing. He successfully melds together those nuggets with social history, on the shop floor and beyond the factory walls, from union battles to worker exploitation and, in the case of Foxconn, suicides. Consider, for example, his account of one of the most famous factory bosses of all.

Henry Ford launched his Model T in 1908, turning the car from a luxury into a mass-manufactured product. Ford’s original factory, just outside Detroit, used standardised parts and fitted them to vehicles as they travelled along a moving assembly line. By 1914 this cut the labour time needed to assemble a Model T from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes. Before long the nearby River Rouge complex became the centre of a vertically integrated empire, designed to produce everything required to make a car.

The Model T, however, soon became obsolete. As Mr Freeman describes, this exposed the weakness of the Ford system: it is extremely expensive and slow to switch a giant factory from one product to another. In 1927 Ford halted production and laid off 60,000 workers, causing a social crisis in the Detroit area. After six months 15,000 machine tools had been replaced and 25,000 others rebuilt, so that the Rouge was ready to make the new Model A. At its zenith the factory employed 100,000 people. But it was a brutal place to work, with employees subject to harsh discipline and tyrannical foremen. “A man checks ’is brains and ’is freedom at the door,” one Rouge worker complained.

As the switch from Model T to Model A plunged Ford into loss, Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors, presciently observed that carmakers would need to “adopt the ‘laws’ of Paris dressmakers”. That meant bringing out new models more often. The shortening of product cycles and the fickle nature of modern markets has duly seen manufacturing atomise into smaller, nimbler, more specialist factories. The Rouge, for instance, lives on, but with just 6,000 workers making pick-up trucks.

Some see offshoring to low-wage countries, particularly in Asia, as the mega-factory’s last hurrah. Yet long supply chains and distant plants are leaving producers vulnerable to rapid changes in their home markets, so production has been trickling back. Meanwhile new materials and manufacturing methods, such as 3D printing, are demolishing the economies of scale that giant factories have relied on. Although Mr Freeman is not ready to write off his behemoths, he has probably written their obituary.