- [Instructor] 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? It's because The Market Revolution was a confluence of inventions, changes in the way that the
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 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 wanna 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. And in this video I wanna
start out by talking about The Industrial Revolution. OK, 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 in the United States you often think of kind of an agrarian society; and that was how Thomas Jefferson, the author of The
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 kinda 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, his
name is Samuel Slater, and Samuel Slater was an Englishman who worked in a textile mill. And remember that the United Kingdom was the world's capital of textile
production in this time. And they were so jealous of their 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 worked; 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, people were so
angry that he did this that in his home town 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 kinda 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 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 Lowell decided to set up a whole series of textile mills in what will be called Lowell, Massachusetts. It's just outside of Boston. And then he primarily employed young women to work in these textile mills. 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 women
you could probably pay a little bit less than young
men for the same kind of labor. So this is kind of a very slow revolution toward individual work. Because as 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. It was known as the Rhode Island System. By this time, by Lowell's mills, he started hiring individual
workers for individual wages. And the working conditions
were pretty brutal. Most women at the Lowell mills worked 12-hour days with no air conditioning, remember, this is long before
there's air conditioning, for pretty low wages. I'd say probably about
three dollars a week. But despite the pretty harsh conditions, for many of them this was
a really good opportunity 'cause this was the
first time in their lives they'd ever had any chance
to make money of their own, to be away from their families. It's kind of expected that
if you were a young woman in Massachusetts you wanted to
go work in the Lowell 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 if kinda 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 Howe invents a really excellent sewing machine. He's not the first man ever
to invent a sewing machine. There were versions of
them stretching back to think even the 1750s, but Howe's sewing machine brought together a lot of different capacities that made it kinda the best sewing machine. And it will be even further
refined by Isaac Singer, 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 gin. And the cotton gin was invented
by Eli Whitney in 1793. And what's important about the cotton gin, so here's the gin, 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. If you've never held a ball of cotton, it's extremely sticky, so you
kinda have to wade through the little bits of cotton,
pull out these seeds. It takes forever. And so an average day's
work would not produce all that much cotton that
was ready for market. Well, Whitney completely
revolutionizes this with the cotton gin. 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 cotton gin 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 'cause it had kind of 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; and so the institution
of slavery was actually starting to die out a little bit. Before the 1790s people were saying: "Eh, I don't know if it's
actually worth it to keep slaves." So if it weren't for the cotton gin, 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 had 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.