one of the crazy things about the pre-telegraph era was the speed of information. the telegraph and in particular the trans-atlantic telegraph just blew people away.

i would argue that the tempo of business in the 18th century was in general, approximately, 20 times slower, than today. not only speed of information but also the fact that business could not really be done effectively after the sun went down.

It would be interesting to look at commodity price fluctuations in the past and to see the graphs. I imagine very smooth (and inaccurate) graphs with huge regional differences (that probably smart guys took advantage of). Those same graphs around the mid 1800s probably began to get much more wiggly as telegraphy allowed for price transmission.

Regional prices still differed a lot because of slow transportation. You know, a banana used to cost a dime a slice, so that an entire banana in 1890 might have been a buck or two, which is like 50 bucks today and even a rich person was happy to eat a brown banana.