Listen to a part of a lecture from a history class. The professor is talking about the Industrial Revolution.

(female professor)
Back in the18th century, in a time known as the Industrial Revolution, some countries, well, England in particular, started using new technology, like steam-powered machines to produce goods. And the use of these machines brought about some significant changes. Let’s go over two main changes that occurred.

One change was that the center of production moved from homes to factories. Um, let’s take fabric, or cloth, as an example. Historically, for a very long time, people had made cloth by hand in their homes, earning a little money from their home-based cloth production. But then these new steam-powered machines for weaving cloth were invented and placed in factories, and these machines could weave cloth much more quickly and efficiently. So there wasn’t any reason to keep making cloth slowly in homes when it could be made faster on factory machines. Thus the majority of cloth productions shifted from home-based businesses to factory production.

Another result of the new technology is that cities started forming around factories, like let’s say there was a cloth factory that was built in a certain small village. Now, of course, the factory needed workers to operate the machines used in cloth production. So the factory would hire a lot of rural workers who would then move from the country side to the village. So instead of spreading all over the country side, the workers started to congregate in the village with the factory. As a result, the village got bigger and bigger and eventually grew to a city.