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Dear Geoff, Again, it's a matter of defining what you mean by mass manufacturing. Block manufacture in the Portland Yards offers an excellent example for understanding changes to manufacturing in the industrial era, but there were many early examples of mass manufacturing for identical artifacts. As in this example of blocks for the Royal Navy, many of these were military. Consider the great armies of imperial Persia in the 5th century BC. Herodotus states that Xerxes employed over one and a half million soldiers on land with more on sea. The total including sea fighters and allies added up to over two and a half million men. All required arms and weapons. Even allowing for some exaggeration -- and modern research shows that Herodotus was far more accurate than scholars of earlier generations believed him to be -- those armies required huge loads of weapons for ordinary foot soldiers who could not afford the hand-crafted smith work that nobles and officers might use. The government had to run some kind of armory to provide these soldiers with weapons and equipment. For an army this size, the weapons and equipment would have been uniform and mass manufactured. The bricks that built many ancient structures going back to Egypt and Assyria were also mass manufactured. For that matter, ancient China had a massive arms industry. In the eleventh century, Chinese mines were produced over 125,000 tons of iron per year, and most of it went to the military and the government. In comparison, the UK did not produce this much iron until the British industrial revolution arrived seven centuries later. The army had over 1,000,000 soldiers. Here, too, mass manufacturing had a role in armaments production. While Brunel's engineering skill raised mass manufacturing to new levels of quality and efficiency, mass manufacturing production of artifacts in long series runs goes back several thousand years. Yours, Ken Geoff Matthews wrote: The first example of production-line, mass production is often quoted as Marc Isambard Brunel's 1799 idea for a blockmaking machine realised at Portsmouth in 1805 through collaboration with Maudsley. --snip-- If anyone comes up with a better earlier example it would be very interesting to read an account. --snip--