05-06-2017, 11:15 AM
Manufacturing Engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with various manufacturing sciences and practices, including research, design and development of systems, processes, machines, tools and equipment. The main focus of the manufacturing engineer is to convert raw materials into a new or updated product in the most economical, efficient and effective way possible.
The history of manufacturing engineering can be traced to factories in the mid-19th century US and 18th-century UK. Although large production centers and workshops have been established in China, ancient Rome and the Middle East, the Venice Arsenal offers one of the earliest examples of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in the Republic of Venice several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, this factory mass production of ships on assembly lines with manufactured parts. Apparently, the Venice Arsenal produced almost a ship every day and, at its peak, employed 16,000 people.
Many historians consider Matthew Boulton's Soho Factory (established in 1761 in Birmingham) as the first modern factory. Similar claims can be made for John Lombe's silk mill at Derby (1721), or Richard Arkwright's Cromford mill (1771). The Cromford mill was built specifically to accommodate the equipment it had and carry the material through the various manufacturing processes.
