STEVE HEIMLER: Hi, everybody. And welcome back to Heimler's History.

Last time, we talked about how all those German and Irish immigrants needed the American economy just as much as the American economy needed them. And the reason why is because that epoch-shifting, factory-spawning, culture-shattering transformation known as the Industrial Revolution was making its way across the sea, from Europe into America. And that's what we're going to talk about in this lecture.

So buckle your seat belt because we've got a lot to do and a little amount of time. Let's get to it.

SPEAKER: It's time to take it old school.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Whew.

STEVE HEIMLER: OK, so what is the Industrial Revolution? Well, it's basically that cultural and economic revolution in which machines displace farms and homesteads as the primary place of work for a society. So when you think industrial, think factory. It was the rise of the factory system in America.

All right, good news. We've got intrigue and deception right off the bat. Meet Samuel Slater, who is known as the father of the American factory system. But here's where it gets juicy.

Even though Slater was the father of the American factory system, he himself was not American. He was British. And he went to work in the British factories, memorized the intricate component parts of the textile machines, then fled undercover to America, built the first textile machine from memory. And all of a sudden, America has its first machine for the efficient spinning of cotton thread.

But that machine is hungry. So where is it going to get all of the cotton it needs? I mean, a plantation slave could spend all day separating seeds from just one pound of cotton. Enter Eli Whitney.

Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, which was able to separate the seeds from the cotton at a pace far faster than any human could ever do it. And you would think, wouldn't you, that if fewer slave hands are needed to separate cotton down from cotton seeds because the machines could do so much better, that Southern slavery would be on its deathbed.

As it turned out, as the cotton machines got hungrier and hungrier for more cotton, the Southern plantation owners needed to plant more and more cotton. So not only did the cotton gin not make slave labor obsolete, it actually created a huge demand for more slave labor.

But it wasn't only the textile industry that grew up during this time. Eli Whitney also figured out how to create guns with interchangeable parts, so they could be mass produced. And then people could more efficiently deliver lead into the bodies of their enemies.

And then there's Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph and tested it with the code that bears his name in 1844, with the first message ever sent across the electric wires, "What hath God wrought."

Now, by the eve of the Civil War, telegraph wires spanned the entire nation from East to West. And now, people could hear news about what was going on over the whole nation, rather than just their region or their town. But the problem with that is most of the news that people began hearing from across the nation had nothing to do with their daily lives.

And so this was the time-- interesting little tidbit-- that crossword puzzles begin showing up in newspapers because what were people going to do with all of that excess information that had no direct bearing on their lives? Entertain themselves.

Now, I said before that the Industrial Revolution was also a cultural upheaval. And I was not lying to you. Women, whose place had always been in the home, making the man his sandwiches, found opportunities to work in factories. And I say hurrah to those progressive male factory owners who saw the gender gap and wanted to close it by giving women the dignity of work.

Come again. They only employed women because they could pay them a fourth of what they paid men. Well, that doesn't sound very progressive.

Now, it wasn't only textile innovations that revolutionized this period. There was also a national road that was built connecting the Ohio and the Potomac Rivers. In addition, steam boats were introduced. And I cannot emphasize enough just how revolutionary steam power was for America.

Let's say an Ohioan wants to sell some goods to a Georgian. Before the steam boat, that Ohioan would string together a few logs into a raft, sail down the Mississippi River, and then sell his goods. But the pesky thing about rivers is that they only flow in one direction. So that once this guy reaches his termination point downriver, his raft is basically useless. He cannot go back upstream. So he is either going to be hitchhiking or walking back to Ohio.

But with the introduction of steam power, a boat could go downriver and upriver in a fraction of the time. And, oh, baby that's going to put some boom-boom in daddy's pocket.

And maybe the most significant innovation during this time was the iron horse, the locomotive. Trains changed everything. They were fast, reliable, cheaper to construct than canals, and didn't freeze over in the winter.

By 1860, the US had laid 30,000 miles of train tracks. And this innovation connected the East, and the West, and the North, and the South like never before. Market goods were shipped all over the country. People traveled and relocated more often than ever before.

Now, put all of this together. Put it in a pot. Baby, you've got a stew going.

So what were the consequences of all of this? Well, one of the major consequences is what historians call the Market Revolution. You see prior to all of this, families mostly raised their own food, spun their own wool, and then traded with their neighbors for whatever they could not provide for themselves.

But the Industrial Revolution came along, and the Market Revolution that accompanied it, and scattered families outward, to work in mills and factories. And if they were farmers, they no longer farmed for subsistence. That is, what they themselves could eat. But now they farmed cash crops to go sell on a market.

And furthermore, now people had more money. And they used that money to buy things from strangers that they previously would have made for themselves. So in some ways, the Industrial Revolution was very good for America. It put a lot of people to work and created a real boom in the economy. On the other hand, it cut real and lasting divisions in the family unit by sending them off to work in different directions.

Good or bad, it certainly happened. And it certainly changed the face and the heart of America, back then, even into today. So we'll leave it there for now. And I'll see you next time.