The revolution in continental Europe had begun in Ratingen near Düsseldorf.

Within a few years it spread across Europe, turned the economy upside down, transformed entire societies and created immense wealth.

When Count von Spee leased the old Ratingen mill on the Anger to the Elberfeld merchant Johann Gottfried Brügelmanns almost exactly 240 years ago, the industrial revolution in Germany started.

Stefanie Diemand

Editor in Business.

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Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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The mill became the country's first factory.

It was called Cromford and stands at the beginning of a development that continues to this day.

While the machines were initially driven by huge water wheels, they were later kept running by steam and electricity.

Today the focus is on automation, bits and bytes, work without workers and robots with artificial intelligence.

There are factories as big as a city and factories as famous as a pop star.

But one of the most famous factories probably never existed.

There was a lot of reviewing, philosophizing and arguing about her.


Based on the pin factory, the moral philosopher Adam Smith explained a fundamental concept of the economy in his work “Wealth of Nations”: The division of labor – the principle of every factory.

A worker can produce a maximum of 20 pins per day.

However, if production is mechanized, reorganized and divided into individual steps - "on the drawing, straightening or cutting of the wire, grinding the needle point, making the pin head, bleaching or packaging the finished needles" - then due to the specialization 48,000 needles possible in one day.

Gründerzeit 2.0

The division of labor in factories today is different than it was in Smith's day.

Companies have never been so productive, never have there been so many factories in the world.

Their number is currently estimated at 10 million.

There are almost 400,000 in China, 300,000 in the USA, 185,000 in Japan and an estimated 130,000 in Germany.

The land of poets and thinkers is also the land of industry and factories.

To this day, it attracts companies from all over the world.

The American car manufacturer Tesla opened a factory for the production of electric cars near Berlin.

The US semiconductor company Intel wants to set up six chip factories near Magdeburg.

Bosch, Infineon and GF continue to expand their plants in Dresden.

As in the early days, Germany is currently experiencing a factory boom - thanks to automation, Cedrik Neike said at the industrial fair in Hanover in the spring.

Neike should know, since he is responsible for the industrial business of the Munich group Siemens.

What began in the 1970s with robots in the factories of car manufacturers now extends to almost all sectors: from pharmaceuticals to agriculture.

For this purpose, the engineers at the software group SAP have developed a so-called Metabot, an industrial platform on which the real and virtual worlds meet, design digital twins and robots work hand in hand.

While top managers work on the companies of the future, Claudia Gottfried takes care of the past.

She manages the factory in Ratingen, which was elevated to an industrial museum and where it all began.

A cotton mill with manor house, English name and landscaped park.

This gem of history was built according to British models and secret plans and operated until 1977.

Then came the end.

Today it is a museum with facilities that are true to the original.

The old machines have been recreated, from the beating table to the carding and waterframe machine to the Feinharde, the doubling and drafting system.

This is how fluffy cotton fibers can be spun into tear-resistant yarns today, just as they were then.

Claudia Gottfried starts the machinery with a few simple steps.

The water wheel starts moving on the lowest floor.

With the precision of a clockwork, it drives the system, which extends to the roof, via a complicated system of leather belts, gears and winches.

It was once possible to produce yarns faster and better in this way than on thousands of spinning wheels.

This increased productivity, increased profits and made the Brügelmanns a wealthy family.

spies at work

The Italians, however, were the first to recognize the economic advantage of centralized work and erected special buildings for it as early as the Renaissance.

They divided production into many small individual steps, standardized the preliminary products and work steps, had spinning wheels and looms powered by water wheels, created reservoirs and canals for this purpose, relied on the mass production of high-quality yarns and fabrics and thus gained decisive advantages on Europe's textile markets.

A hundred years later, the factory systems of Venice and Bologna were to be spied on and copied by English engineers.

Around 1720, the Lombe Brothers in Derby built England's first factory based on Italian blueprints.

In 1771 the first cotton mill was in Cromford, based on Ratingen.

Around 1800, the English knew how best to run a factory using completely new spinning and weaving machines.

The industrial revolution entered the first round.

Steam engines and electric generators were followed by two more.

Today's factories are all about data.

They put the economy before the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0

The concept was launched by three Germans: Henning Kagermann, then head of the Academy of Engineering Sciences;

Wolfgang Wahlster, longtime head of the German AI Research Center;

and Wolf-Dieter Lukas from the Berlin Ministry of Research.

They presented their plan in 2012 and their final report in 2013.

your vision.

Machines talk to machines, factories to factories;

Sensors, computers and data networks make it possible.