Charles Babbage toured the workshops of Britain and thought about them as no one had before. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) analyses tools, processes, and the division of labour — including the famous ‘Babbage principle’ of splitting work by skill — founding the scientific study of production itself.
Marx and Mill both mined it; operations research descends from it. Download the free EPUB for the factory system’s first great theorist.