How did the telegraph effect the economy?

The telegraph helped to integrate the economy, forging a national economic system. Along with its "sister" invention in transportation, the locomotive, it enabled long-distance transactions to take place. For example, merchants in New York City could be almost instantly apprised of cotton prices in New Orleans markets, and vice versa. Planters in the South could order farm implements and other capital goods from manufacturers in the North, and receive lines of credit from bankers far distant from home. Historian Daniel Walker Howe cites the invention of the telegraph as part of a "communications revolution" that occurred in the thirty years or so before the Civil War. In his book What Hath God Wrought (named after the first words transmitted over the telegraph by Samuel Morse, its inventor) Howe sees the telegraph and the railroads as essential to the development of a market economy in the United States. "The electric telegraph," Howe writes, "helped integrate [the] continental empire." The telegraph made territorial expansion, so important to economic expansion, possible by linking distant regions. It also facilitated rapid communication between Europe and the United States after the first transatlantic cables were laid just before the Civil War. Before the telegraph, news and other information could only travel as fast as a horse or a ship. The telegraph connected the world in ways unimaginable before its invention.