From the pyramids to the software factory.
For more than 4,000 years people have worked on one problem: how to get many hands to make one thing well. Each answer added one idea. Every one is still in use.
Scroll to walk through them. Drag any model to look around.
Giza
The Great Pyramid needed white limestone from a quarry across the Nile. An inspector named Merer ran the crew of 40 that shipped it and kept a diary: where they loaded, where they sailed, where they slept.
It is the oldest papyrus with writing ever found. Beside it lay account sheets for the workers’ bread, beer and meat: what was needed, what had arrived, what was still owed.
The Qin workshops
The First Emperor of China was buried with a clay army and some 40,000 bronze weapons. Each crossbow trigger has 5 parts: 3 that move and 2 bolts.
Researchers who measured more than 200 of them found they were made in batches to a standard. Many weapons carry the mark of the workshop that made them, so a bad one could be traced.
Venice Arsenal
Venice needed warships faster than any yard could build them, so the Arsenal stopped building each ship in one place. A bare hull was towed down a canal, and every warehouse it passed handed over its part.
At its peak the yard could turn out close to one ship a day.
Cromford Mill
Richard Arkwright had a spinning machine too big for a cottage. He built a mill beside a stream in Derbyshire and put the water wheel, the machines and the people under one roof, working to one clock.
A silk mill in Derby had done something similar 50 years earlier. Cromford is the one the world copied.
The jig
Before the jig, every part was filed by hand to fit the one beside it. A jig holds the piece and guides the tool, so the part comes out the same whoever is working.
French gunmakers showed swappable parts in the 1780s. American armories made them routine by the 1830s.
Portsmouth Block Mills
The navy ran on wooden pulley blocks, each cut by hand. Marc Brunel designed a run of machines that each made a single cut. Henry Maudslay built them, and steam drove them through shafts overhead.
By the traditional figure, 10 men now did the work of 110.
Ford Highland Park
Ford’s engineers turned the job around. The men used to walk to the car. Now the car came to them, pulled past in a fixed order at a set pace.
By early 1914, building a chassis took about 1.5 hours, down from about 12.
The Toyoda loom
A loom that keeps weaving after a thread breaks makes cloth nobody can sell. The Toyoda Type G, finished in 1924, stopped itself the moment a thread snapped and changed its own shuttle without pausing.
One person could now mind dozens of looms. In 1937 the loom company’s car department became Toyota.
Willow Run
Then came the test of how far a line could stretch. Ford built a hall about a mile long outside Detroit and ran bombers down it the way it ran cars.
By 1944 a finished B-24 rolled out roughly every hour.
Toyota
Every line so far ran one way, and a mistake traveled with it to the end. Toyota gave every worker a cord. Pull it and a lamp lights. If the problem can’t be fixed in time, the whole line stops.
The fix then becomes the new standard. Watch the cards build up on the rack.
TSMC
Until 1987, a company that designed a chip also had to own the factory that made it. Morris Chang founded TSMC in Hsinchu, Taiwan, to make other people’s designs and none of its own.
Designers no longer needed a factory, and the factory never competed with its customers.
The lights-out factory
Once the standards were good enough, the people could leave. FANUC is reported to have run a robot plant this way since 2001: robots building robots through the night, with the lights off.
In this model one person watches from a lit window and steps in only when something goes wrong.
Amazon’s warehouses
A warehouse is a factory that makes parcels. In Amazon’s, robots carry whole shelves to the person picking, and one system routes the entire fleet so the robots stay out of each other’s way.
More than a million robots now work there, nearly as many as the people.
Tesla Fremont
Tesla set out to build its Model 3 with as few people as it could, then missed its target of 2,500 cars a week. Elon Musk’s verdict was that excessive automation had been a mistake, and his own: “Humans are underrated.”
The company scrapped a complex conveyor and brought people back onto the line.
SpaceX Starfactory
Every factory before this one made the same thing again and again. Starfactory builds a rocket whose design keeps changing from one batch to the next.
Crews stack steel rings into sections while the line is rebuilt around them, so people still work alongside the robots.
The software factory
A software factory has no building. It runs in the cloud, and it is made of loops.
Start with one loop, for software. A signal comes in. The agent checks the plan and decides. It builds. The work passes a check. The output ships, and the loop goes round again.
One agent, one job at a time. A person checks every result.
One loop becomes several
Backend, UI and security each run a loop of their own inside product.
Agents start every job with no memory of the last one. So at the center sit the two things the factory cannot lose: the plan, and a brain that keeps what every loop learned.
Then it broadens out
Pull back. The loop that builds software can run the rest of the business too.
Service, marketing, sales, growth, operations and finance get loops of their own, around the same plan and the same brain.
And it speeds up
Every part runs more loops, quicker. A job waits for you only when it falls outside the rules.
Old ideas, in a new place
Almost nothing in the software factory is new. Each part was worked out earlier on this page.
Four things no factory had before
The workers can read. A jig had to be cut from steel. An agent takes its instructions in plain words, so a rule can be written in a minute and changed in another.
It has no floor. Nothing is bolted down. It runs in the cloud: one automation on repeat in the morning, a hundred agents by the afternoon.
The work finds itself. Agents notice problems and put them on the plan themselves.
It changes its own shape. People rebuilt every earlier factory between runs. This one adds agents and removes stops while it runs.
Where the factory goes next
The pattern is now leaving software and heading back to the physical world: one plan, many workers, a check and loops that carry what was learned back to the start.
Robots. Humanoid robots are starting on live production lines, on narrow jobs such as moving boxes, with people supervising. source
Machinery. The controllers that run a line are moving into software, so a line can be re-arranged the way code is changed. source
Laboratories. In a self-driving lab, robots run the experiment and a model chooses the next one. source
Services. Some firms now sell the finished work, such as a set of closed books, where they used to sell the tool. source
Factory or system? A factory is a place you can watch. A system is what decides how that place changes. Toyota called its method a production system, not a factory. This page shows factories because you can watch a floor.
Where the facts come from
Every date and figure on this page was checked against the sources below.