page_title: Manufacturing
section_title: History and development
hierarchical_section_title: Manufacturing / History and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Regenerative thermal oxidizer manufacturing
context_page_description: Manufacturing is the production of products for use or sale, using labor and machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary industry. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from primary industry are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products, or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers.
  Manufacturing engineering, or the manufacturing process, are the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final product. The manufacturing process begins with the product design, and materials specification from which the product is made. These materials are then modified through manufacturing processes to become the required part.
  Modern manufacturing includes all intermediate processes required in the production and integration of a product's components. Some industries, such as semiconductor and steel manufacturers, use the term fabrication instead.
context_section_description: In its earliest form, manufacturing was usually carried out by a single skilled artisan with assistants. Training was by apprenticeship. In much of the pre-industrial world, the guild system protected the privileges and trade secrets of urban artisans.
  In the pre-industrial world, most manufacturing occurred in rural areas, where household-based manufacturing served as a supplemental subsistence strategy to agriculture (and continues to do so in places). Entrepreneurs organized a number of manufacturing households into a single enterprise through the putting-out system.
  The factory system was first adopted in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century and later spread around the world. The main characteristic of the factory system is the use of machinery, originally powered by water or steam and later by electricity. Increased use of economies of scale, the centralization of factories, and standardization of interchangeable parts were adopted in the American system of manufacturing in the nineteenth century.
  The mechanized assembly line was introduced to assemble parts in a repeatable fashion, with individual workers performing specific steps during the process. This led to significant increases in efficiency, lowering the cost of the end process. Later, automation was introduced to incrementally replace human operators, a trend that has accelerated with the development of the computer and the robot.
  Manufacturing in the Soviet Union was based on collectivism.
caption: Finished regenerative thermal oxidizer at manufacturing plant
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