is credited with displacing child labour, with the automatic glass bottle blowing machine (c. 1890) cited as an example, having been said to do more to end child labour than child labour laws. Years of schooling began to increase sharply from the end of the nineteenth century. Some industrialists themselves tried to improve factory and living conditions for their workers. One of the earliest such reformers was Robert Owen, known for his pioneering efforts in improving conditions for workers at the New Lanark mills, and often regarded as one of the key thinkers of the early socialist movement. Karl Marx worried that the capitalist system would eventually lead to wages only sufficient for subsistence due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Subsistence wages were indeed the case in parts of England. The British Agricultural Revolution had been reducing the need for labour on farms for over a century and these workers were forced to sell their labour wherever they could. Conditions were particularly bad during the depression years of the late 1830s to early 1840s. The depression was immediately followed by the Irish famine of 1845–50 which brought large numbers of Irish immigrants to seek work in the English and American factories. One of the best known accounts of factory workers’ living conditions during the Industrial Revolution is Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. By the late 1880s, Engels noted that the extreme poverty and lack of sanitation he wrote about in 1844 had largely disappeared. See also Adam Smith Arnold Toynbee (historian, born 1852) Assembly line Mass production Mechanization Productivity-improving technologies References Citations Sources Industrial Revolution History of manufacturing