the Market Revolution

in the United States

which was this period in the first half

of the 19th century

where the way that Americans did business really changed.

And it changed in a number of ways,

so the kinds of work that people did changed

and the people they sold their goods to changed

in the form of new markets.

And even the kinds of commodities

that they were producing.

All of these were altered in the first half

of the 19th century,

thanks to a couple of simultaneous trends.

The Industrial Revolution in which new technologies

were developed to make production more efficient

and revolutions in transportation and communication,

which made it easier to get goods and people

to far distances more quickly

and to communicate over considerable distances

more quickly.

And these really resulted in a reorganization

of American society

that some historians have actually said

was more revolutionary than the American Revolution.

So in the last video,

we discussed some of the new technologies

which changed American work in the early 19th century.

One of these was the introduction of the textile mill,

which was powered by a water wheel,

by Samuel Slater,

which helped textile mills become the chief industry

of New England,

also helped women start working outside the home

in the Lowell Mills, started by Charles Lowell

and also began the system by which factory owners

would hire individuals, rather than family units,

to work for wages in their factories.

The other major invention that had a really important impact

on American society was the cotton gin,

which was a machine that separated cotton seeds

from the fiber and it made the production of cotton

considerably more profitable.

And so, with cotton a profitable crop,

the American south really invested in cotton

and investing in cotton as its main cash crop

meant they really entrenched the system of slavery.

So even though in the 1780s, early 1790s,

many southern states were thinking perhaps

they'd abolish slavery because the institution was not

overly profitable,

as cotton became the cash crop of the south,

the institution of slavery would be entrenched

and continue to grow until the 1860s.

So those are some of the new technologies of production.

In this video, I wanna spend some time talking about

the revolution in communication and transportation

that happened also in this time period.

So just like inventions like the textile mill

or the cotton gin made it easier to work faster,

inventions in transportation and communication

in the early 19th century also made it possible

to transport goods faster

and to transport information faster.

So I wanna talk about just a few

of these transportation inventions.

One of these was the railroad.

Now, the railroad was not invented in the United States.

Rather, the United States imported the railroad technology

from England and Germany

and this is one of the very first railroads

in the United States,

I think it's kind of adorable

'cause you can see how it still is really

owing a debt, stylistically, to a wagon.

Even looks like a wagon here on the end.

So railroads begin to come into the United States

in the early 1800s and first they're mostly for cargo

or helping to move stone,

things to help build canals,

which we'll get to in a second.

But soon they're also passenger rail stations.

And the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,

or B&O railroad,

which you may know from your Monopoly board

was one of the first passenger rail lines

in the United States.

Another major transportation revolution

of this time period was shipping on water.

So, in 1807,

inventor Robert Fulton

came up with the steamship

and so a steamship,

and you can see the little smokestacks right here,

makes it much easier to power the ship

and one thing you can do then is go against the tide

of a river,

so instead of just, for example,

going down the Mississippi River

to the port of New Orleans,

you can also go back up the Mississippi River

which means commerce can go more easily in both directions.

Another major innovation of the time period are canals.

And this here is a map of the Erie Canal,

which was completed in 1825

and a canal is a relatively narrow,

relatively shallow waterway

but it still allows cargo barges to move across

what otherwise would be really hard to navigate territory,

so, you know, it's hard to see here,

but there are mountains here, right.

So, now you can take

cargo across mountains,

across large stretches of land by ship,

which is much faster

than trying to do it on foot

or with a wagon.

I think it's actually hard for us to imagine now,

but in the early 19th century

and really for most of time before then,

waterways were the highways of the world.

It was a lot easier to get from Boston to London

across the Atlantic by ship

than it would have been to get from Boston

to the Appalachian Mountains on foot.

Before the invention of air travel,

before the Interstate Highway System,

and really, up until the invention of the railroad,

waterways were the easiest way to get around

in the world.

And the last communication revolution

that I wanna talk about is the invention of the telegraph,

which a portrait painter-turned-inventor

named Samuel Morse

first patented in 1844

and Morse invented Morse Code

because the telegraph worked by sending

pulses down copper wires

and so it made it easy to communicate

through coded messages of dots and dashes.

So, dots and dashes corresponded with letters

which allowed you to send messages over

extremely long distances,

so you could send a message by telegraph

in an instant,

as opposed to sending a letter,

which might take days or even weeks

to get to its destination.

So, all of these revolutions in transportation

and communication kind of translate into

two major transformations in American business

at this time period.

One, is that the scope

of business that you can do is much greater

because now, if you're a farmer who lives in,

say, Rochester,

your radius of...

your radius of people you can sell your produce to

before it goes bad is considerably larger.

Now, instead of just being able to get to

where you can get maybe in a wagon's trip of a day,

you can send your crops on the Erie Canal

and suddenly, you're dealing with a much larger market.

So, they're not only creating a national web of commerce,

they're also creating an international web of commerce

because these canals and steamships

go to international ports which mean that

you can now do business from the western part of New York

with people who live in London.

And the other thing that increases here

is the pace of business,

right, so instead of having to negotiate a business deal

through a series of letters,

which might take you many weeks,

now you can negotiate a business deal

by the telegraph

and it's only gonna take you a couple of days.

Likewise, it might have taken you weeks

to send your logs for example,

down the Mississippi River.

Now you have them in a steamship

and it takes just a couple of days.

So there's an overall expansion

in the number of people who can participate in markets.

The expansion of the distance at which

you can participate in a market

and the pace at which you can do it.

You can do business much faster

with these revolutions in transportation

and communication.

And in the next video,

I'll talk more about how these transformations

in technology

and the scope and pace of American business affected

the society of the United States

in the early 19th century.