Factory

A factory, also called a manufacturing plant or production plant, is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. The cited article calls factories a critical part of modern economic production, with the majority of the goods of the world being created or processed within them, and says they arose with the introduction of machinery during the Industrial Revolution, when the capital and space requirements became too great for cottage industry or workshops. Buildings recorded in the atlas as factories and industrial buildings are grouped under this concept.