EVOLUTION OF PLANT AND MACHINERY

Meaning of Plant and Machinery

Plant: “Plant” includes whatever apparatus is used by a business man for carrying on his business, not his stock-in-trade which he buys or makes for sale.

Machinery: Machinery implies the application of mechanical means to the attainment of some particular end by the help of natural forces.

EVOLUTION OF PLANT AND MACHINERY

The Iron Age marked the beginning of mans greatest achievement in departing from his crude way of life to full scale development of machines. This period brought in the beginning of industrial revolution with greater reliance placed on the use of heavy industrial machines.

A machine is a tool containing one or more parts that uses energy to perform an intended action. Machines are usually powered by mechanical, chemical, thermal, or electrical means, and are often motorized. Historically, a power tool also required moving parts to classify as a machine. However, the advent of electronics has led to the development of power tools without moving parts that are considered machines.

A simple machine is a device that simply transforms the direction or magnitude of a force, but a large number of more complex machines exist. Examples include vehicles, electronic systems, molecular machines, computers, television, and radio.

Perhaps the first example of a human made device designed to manage power is the hand axe, made by chipping flint to form a wedge. A wedge is a simple machine that transforms lateral force and movement of the tool into a transverse splitting force and movement of the work piece.

The idea of a simple machine originated with the Greek philosopher Archimedes around the 3rd century BC, who studied the Archimedean simple machines: lever, pulley, and screw. He discovered the principle of mechanical advantage in the lever.

Later Greek philosophers defined the classic five simple machines (excluding the inclined plane) and were able to roughly calculate their mechanical advantage. Heron of Alexandria (ca. 10–75 AD) in his work Mechanics lists five mechanisms that can “set a load in motion”; lever, windlass, pulley, wedge, and screw,[5] and describes their fabrication and uses. However the Greeks’ understanding was limited to statics (the balance of forces) and did not include dynamics (the tradeoff between force and distance) or the concept of work.

During the Renaissance the dynamics of the Mechanical Powers, as the simple machines were called, began to be studied from the standpoint of how much useful work they could perform, leading eventually to the new concept of mechanical work. In 1586 Flemish engineer Simon Stevin derived the mechanical advantage of the inclined plane, and it was included with the other simple machines.

The complete dynamic theory of simple machines was worked out by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1600 in Le Meccaniche (“On Mechanics”). He was the first to understand that simple machines do not create energy, they merely transform it.

The classic rules of sliding friction in machines were discovered by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), but remained unpublished in his notebooks. They were rediscovered by Guillaume Amontons (1699) and were further developed by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1785).

The first machine is stated by one source to have been traps used to assist with the capturing of animals, corresponding to the machine as a mechanism operating independently or with very little force by interaction from a human, with a capacity for use repeatedly with operation exactly the same on every occasion of functioning.
The wheel was invented circa 3000 BC, the spoked wheel c.2000 BC. The Iron Age began approximately 1200-1000 BC.

Archaeology provides a date for the earliest city as 5000 BC as Tell Brak (Ur et al. 2006), therefore a date for cooperation and factors of demand, by an increased community size and population to make something like factory level production a conceivable necessity.

According to one text the water-mill was first made in 555 A.D. by Belisarius, although according to another they were known to Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius in the first century B.C. By the time of the 4th century A.D. mills with a capacity to grind 3 tonnes of cereal an hour, a rate sufficient to meet the needs of 80,000 persons, were in use by the Roman Empire.

The Venice Arsenal provides one of the first examples of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in Venice, Republic of Venice, several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, it mass-produced ships on assembly lines using manufactured parts. The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people.

CONCLUSION
The development of plant and machinery have pass through many developmental stages, starting from the stone age where stones and primitive tools where used as tools to where simple machines were designed for the purpose of making work ease. The industrial revolution have contributed immensely to the development of plant and machineries which give rise to the modern day plants and machineries in manufacturing and industrial setting today. This development (plant and machinery) according to the Guidance Notes on Valuation of Assets (RICS 1979), the practice of plant and machinery valuation came to life in the middle of the 19th century and was largely based on the textile industry in the North of England. The pace of globalization of investments markets coupled with the vast advances in high technologies all underscore the need for highly specialized skill in plant and machinery valuation. Hence the evolution of plant and machinery have given birth to a professional known as Plant and Machinery Valuation.

REFERENCES
Landes, David. S. (1969). The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, New York: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-09418-6.

The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985.

Jerome (1934) gives the industry classification of machine tools as being “other than hand power”. Beginning with the 1900 U.S. census, power use was part of the definition of a factory, distinguishing it from a workshop.
Usher, Abbott Payson (1988). A History of Mechanical Inventions.USA: Courier Dover Publications. p. 98. ISBN 0-486-25593-X.
Strizhak, Viktor; Igor Penkov; Toivo Pappel (2004). “Evolution of design, use, and strength calculations of screw threads and threaded joints”. HMM2004 International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms. Kluwer Academic publishers. p. 245. ISBN 1-4020-2203-4. Retrieved 2008-05-21.
Stephen, Donald; Lowell Cardwell (2001). Wheels, clocks, and rockets: a history of technology. USA: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 85–87. ISBN 0-393-32175-4.
Armstrong-Hélouvry, Brian (1991). Control of machines with friction. USA: Springer. p. 10. ISBN 0-7923-9133-0.