The History of Automation
Mankind has always tried to use technologies in order to improve his life. The wheel, for instance, was invented in order to transport goods saving forces and to move more quickly. The discovery of fire helped to heat him and to defend himself from wild animals.
From the very beginning man has always looked for a better way of life. Time after time, he has continued to improve his environment, both at work and at home.
The first automations in fact were born in the factories, where at the end of the 19th century the first applications of electricity allowed to make some automated operations, without the intervention of a human being.
Slowly then there has been a shift from manual jobs to automated jobs, from simple tools related to the ability of a person to process chains controlled by programmable controllers.
That's why many jobs disappeared and new ones were born, and others have completely been transformed.
So automation is whatever permit to make a sequence of automated activities, often in a faster way. And this idea was born in the world of industry. Here in fact there was the need of helping the worker taking him away from repetitive and depressing jobs: as a consequent automated machines and technologies have been developed, so that the way of working in a factory completely changed and the manual factory became automated.
Just think for example at the automobile industry: production times have been greatly reduced thanks to automated production chains, based on sophisticated machineries handled by programmable controllers which control all the human chains without any human intervention.
