Y10 Humanities

"The third industrial revolution The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made-and change the politics of jobs too Apr 21st 2012 |From the print edition THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week's special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides. A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer's whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation-and may look more like those weavers' cottages than Ford's assembly line. In this section The third industrial revolution Cristina scrapes the barrel Beyond battlefield medicine Flip back please Never again? Reprints Related topics China Technology Science and technology Digital Fabrication Henry Ford Towards a third dimension The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together. Now a product can be designed on a computer and "printed" on a 3D printer, which creates a solid object by building up successive laye