Production of many identical parts and their assembly into finished products.
Though armoury practice ). Marc Brunel , while working for the British Admiralty (1802–08), devised a process for producing wooden pulley blocks by sequential machine operations, whereby 10 men (rather than the 110 needed previously) could make 160,000 pulley blocks per year. Not until London's {{link=Crystal Palace">Crystal Palace exhibition (1851) did British engineers, viewing exhibits of machines used in the U.S. to produce interchangeable parts , begin to apply the system. Within 25 years, the American System was being widely used in making a host of industrial products. See also assembly line ; factory .