so some historians have actually said that the market Revolution is more revolutionary than the American Revolution actually this is a very classic AP US History question which was more revolutionary the American Revolution or the market Revolution but how could something actually be more revolutionary than the American Revolution well it's because the market Revolution was a Confluence Of Inventions changes in the way that the American American people did business and changes in the way that people got Goods to Market that happened in this period from about 1790 to 1850 so this is kind of a large period of history and I don't think it's really important for you to have a laundry list of dates of exactly what when what thing was invented but just kind of take in the idea that in the first half or so of the early 19th century there were many new inventions in both factory work and in transportation and communication and that how people did business changed a lot so I want to take some time to look into all three of these revolutions the Industrial Revolution the revolution in transportation and communication and just the broader Market Revolution so I know this is a subset of itself but I'll get to that um and in this video I want to start out by talking about the Industrial Revolution okay so what was the Industrial Revolution this was broadly speaking a revolution in the kinds of Machinery that people used to make finished goods now if you think about The Early Republic with in the United States you often think of kind of an agrarian society and that was how Thomas Jefferson the author of the declar Declaration of Independence really imagined the United States as a nation of small farmers but Thomas Jefferson didn't necessarily see all of these Revolutions in Industry coming he couldn't anticipate that and so in the 1790s early 1800s a bunch of new inventions came to the United states that completely revolutionized how things were made so in this time period the United States kind of slowly begins its transformation from being a nation of farmers to a nation of people who worked for wages by the hour and then used the money that they made from that hourly labor to buy the things that they need so how did this happen one event that historians often point to is the introduction of the textile mill to the United States so this fellow here uh was named Samuel Slater and Samuel Slater was an Englishman uh who worked in a textile mill and remember that the United Kingdom was the world's capital of textile production in this time uh and they were so jealous of position as the world's leading textile producer that they even made it illegal to export the plans for a textile mill Samuel Slater decided that even if it was illegal to export actual plans it wasn't necessarily illegal to export his brain so he decided to memorize how these textile looms work and this is powered by a water wheel and then he actually got in Disguise put himself on a ship and came to Rhode Island to set up a textile mill in fact uh people were so angry that he did this that in his hometown he's actually known as Slater the traitor so what was new about this well I think the water wheel aspect is really one of the key Innovations here so instead of being powered by humans or perhaps being powered by animals Now American Machinery can be powered by an outside source so water or Steam and that means that these Mills and factories later are going to kind of congregate around sources of power like Rivers for example so if you've ever wondered why so many American cities are next to rivers it's usually because they needed them to power Mills so starting in the 1790s and really into the early 19th century there's this slow transformation toward Factory labor and you can see in this image here that a lot of the people actually laboring in these factories were women because you know young men kind of had a pretty good path forward in life at this time period they could be Farmers like their fathers maybe they could learn a trade but for young women there wasn't necessarily a form of income outside the house and so a man named Charles LOL uh decided to set up a whole series of textile mills in what will be called LOL Massachusetts it's just outside of Boston and he Prim primarily employed young women to work work in these textile mills I think partly because young women were associated with working with fabric women frequently did the spinning and The Sewing in the household but also because young women you could probably pay a little bit less than young men for the same kind of Labor so so this is kind of a very slow Revolution toward individual work right because as a a nation of farmers most people would have worked in a family unit and even some of the very earliest factories in the United States would hire family units that was known as the road Island system by this time by lol's Mills he started hiring individual workers for individual wages and the working conditions were pretty brutal you know most uh women at the low Mills worked 12-hour days uh with no air conditioning remember this is long before there's air conditioning um for pretty low wages I'd say probably about $3 a week but despite the pretty harsh conditions for many of them this was a really good opportunity cuz this is the first time in their lives they'd ever had any chance to make money of their own to be aw from their families as kind of expected that if you were a young woman in Massachusetts you wanted to go work in the L Mills you could go there for a few years of your life make a little bit of money and then go back to your hometown meet someone get married start a family of your own so it kind of makes work for women outside the home respectable and textile production is going to continue to ramp up in the United States in the late 1840s a man named Elias how invents uh a really excellent sewing machine now he's not the first man ever to invent a sewing machine there were versions of them stretching back to I think even the 1750s but how has sewing machine brought together a lot of different capacities that made it kind of the best sewing machine and it will be even further refined by Isaac Singer uh who we associate today with the Singer sewing machine and so these massive textile mills really become the backbone of New England Commerce but they never would have gotten started without another invention which was the cotton Jin and the cotton Jin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793 and what what's important about the cotton Jin so here's the Jin and basically it's kind of a box with some spikes on it that allows you to take these balls of cotton and separate them from the seeds and separating cotton from the seeds was an extremely labor intensive process um if you've never held a ball of cotton uh it's extremely sticky so you kind of have to Wade through the little bits of cotton pull out these seeds uh it takes forever and so an average day work would not produce all that much cotton that was ready for Market well Whitney completely revolutionizes this with the cotton Jin these little spikes help separate the cotton seeds from the cotton ball and revolutionizes how much cotton can be produced by a single person in a single day Whitney's cot coton Jin made it possible for a single person to process 50 pounds of cotton in a single day which is just an order of magnitude more than they were able to do beforehand this is really interesting because it had kind of a a massive human cost in the form of really bolstering the institution of slavery in the American South because when farming cotton was so labor intensive it really wasn't very profitable able and so the institution of slavery was actually starting to die out a little bit before the 1790s people were saying I don't know if it's actually worth it to keep slaves so if it weren't for the cotton genin the United States might actually have outlawed slavery considerably earlier than it ended up doing in the 1860s so it's interesting to note that even though these inventions really changed the fabric of American Society allowed some people to earn money who'd never been able to earn money before it also meant that the institution of slavery was really entrenched in the United States and would only continue to expand until the 1860s so that's a little bit of a peak into the human cost of the Industrial Revolution and we'll get more into what some of those costs were and what some of the benefits were in the next video