Parliament sent four inspectors to oversee every textile factory in Britain.
In the early decades of British industrialization, factory floors had no safety rules. Children as young as five worked fourteen-hour shifts in cotton mills. Workers lost fingers, hands, and limbs to unguarded machinery, and no law required employers to prevent it.1
The first meaningful intervention came with the Factory Act of 1833, which banned employment of children under nine in textile mills and limited the working hours of those under eighteen. More significantly, the Act created a system of government factory inspectors, the first time any state had assigned officials to enter private workplaces and enforce labor standards.2
Parliament appointed four inspectors to cover the entire country. The number was laughably small against the scale of British manufacturing, but the principle was new. A private employer's shop floor was no longer beyond the reach of public law.3
Subsequent legislation expanded the scope. The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited women and children from working underground. The Factory Act of 1844 required that dangerous machinery be fenced.4
Germany, France, and the United States followed with their own regulatory frameworks over the next several decades. In the United States, Massachusetts created the first state factory inspection program in 1867.5 The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 garment workers in New York City, accelerated federal attention to workplace conditions.6
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established OSHA in the United States, creating a federal agency with the authority to set and enforce workplace safety standards across all industries.7 The principle that a government can regulate what happens inside a private workplace, unremarkable today, is less than two centuries old.