The real cause of the crash in 1825 England

I knew the change in asymmetric information prior to the crash of 1825 must have been associated with information technology. I checked the growth of Post Office services and found nothing. Then I switched to Newspaper and found the jackpot. Of course, the rise of mass circulation newspapers educated the populace about world events much better. It was the steam powered rotary press, brought to England in 1814.

Once in operation, the mass circulation newspapers raised the accuracy on return on investment for overseas investment. The stock market in England collapsed as small investors discovered the relative low returns.


From Wiki:

Industrial Revolution

By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspaper-type publications though not all of them developed in the same way; content was vastly shaped by regional and cultural preferences.^[13] Advances in printing technology related to the Industrial Revolution enabled newspapers to become an even more widely circulated means of communication. In 1814, The Times (London) acquired a printing press capable of making 1,100 impressions per minute.^[14]

Soon, it was adapted to print on both sides of a page at once. This innovation made newspapers cheaper and thus available to a larger part of the population. In 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript.^[15] Penny press papers cost about one sixth the price of other newspapers and appealed to a wider audience.^[16]

You gotta love Wiki!

The idea of a penny paper was not new in the 1830s. By 1826, multiple editors were experimenting with sports news, gossip, and a cheap press.[4]

Most newspapers in the early nineteenth century cost 6 cents and were distributed through subscriptions. On July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Unlike most later penny papers, Walter's Transcript maintained what was considered good taste, featuring coverage of literature and the theater.This paper sold for four dollars a year. [4]

In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on an industrial scale,^[11] while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.

Two ideas altered the design of the printing press radically: First, the use of steam power for running the machinery, and second the replacement of the printing flatbed with the rotary motion of cylinders. Both elements were for the first time successfully implemented by the German printer Friedrich Koenig in a series of press designs devised between 1802 and 1818.^[52] Having moved to London in 1804, Koenig soon met Thomas Bensley and secured financial support for his project in 1807.^[50] Patented in 1810, Koenig had designed a steam press "much like a hand press connected to a steam engine."^[50] The first production trial of this model occurred in April 1811. He produced his machine with assistance from German engineer Andreas Friedrich Bauer.

Koenig and Bauer sold two of their first models to The Times in London in 1814, capable of 1,100 impressions per hour. The first edition so printed was on November 28, 1814. They went on to perfect the early model so that it could print on both sides of a sheet at once. This began the long process of making newspapers available to a mass audience (which in turn helped spread literacy), and from the 1820s changed the nature of book production, forcing a greater standardization in titles and other metadata. Their company Koenig & Bauer AG is still one of the world's largest manufacturers of printing presses today.

The Crash of 1825 marks the beginning of the modern information age.