Robert Owen is the founder of infant childcare in Great Britain, especially in Scotland.

Though his reform ideas resemble European reform ideas of the time, he is likely not influenced by the overseas views; his ideas of the ideal education are his own.

Born in Newtown, a small market town in Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales, in 1771, Robert was the sixth of seven children.

His father, also named Robert Owen, had a small business as a saddler and ironmonger.

Owen's mother was a Miss Williams, and came from one of the prosperous farming families.

Here young Owen had received almost all his school education, which ended at the age of ten.

In 1787, after serving in a draper's shop for some years, he settled in London.

Traveling to Manchester, he had obtained employment at Satterfield's Drapery in St. Ann's Square.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was a mill manager in Manchester at the Chorlton Twist Mills.

His entrepreneurial spirit, management skill and progressive moral views were emerging by the early 1790s.

In 1793, he had been elected as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where the ideas of reformers and philosophers of the Enlightenment were discussed.

He also became a committee member of the Manchester Board of Health which was set up to promote improvements in the health and working conditions of factory workers.

During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with Caroline Dale, the daughter of the New Lanark mill's proprietor David Dale.

Owen had induced his partners to purchase New Lanark, and after his marriage to Caroline in September 1799, set up home there as manager and part owner of the mills from January 1810.

Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton mills in Manchester, he hopes to conduct New Lanark on higher principles and focus less on commercial principles.

The mill of New Lanark had been started in 1785 by Dale and Richard Arkwright.

The water power afforded by the falls of the Clyde have made it a great attraction.

About two thousand people have associations with the mills.

Five hundred of them are children, brought at the ages of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The children had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people is very unsatisfactory.

Many of the workers are in the lowest levels of the population; theft, drunkenness, and other vices are common; education and sanitation are neglected; and most families live in one room.

The respectable country people refuse to submit to the long hours and demoralizing drudgery of the mills.

Many employers operate the truck system, whereby payment to the workers is made in part or in full by tokens, which have no value outside the mill owner's "truck shop"; the owners are thus able to supply shoddy goods to the truck shop and charge top prices.

Owen opens a store where the people can buy goods of sound quality at little more than wholesale cost, and he places the sale of alcohol under strict supervision.

He passes on the savings from the bulk purchase of goods to the workers.

These principles will come the basis for the cooperative shops in Britain that continue to trade today.

His greatest success is in the support of the young, to which he devotes special attention.