Economic activities, in the course of the great revolution, had less and less connection with the homestead, and except for a tiny minority of the personnel, had no connection with the family of the owner-operator. The seat of the family--the home--continued to exist, but on a far more restricted basis. Arts and crafts moved from the household into the workshop, where they expanded both in extent and in complexity. Domestic tasks were associated with hand labor and simple tools. The great revolution filled the workshop with the ancestors of present day machinery, but with a prodigious difference. In the early step from home workshop to factory, hand tools in plenty were being used in the workshops. As "modernization" progressed, hand tools were replaced by specialized machines.
The implements of specialization--the machine building tools and the machine tools themselves--were housed in forests of associated workshops. The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and square miles of factory floor space. Nowhere were the results of the great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.
Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the planet in any historical period. After two hundred years of meteoric development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last century.
Modern industry "plants"--steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines, textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil refineries--not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and services. An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any industrial center, on any continent. In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management are similar.