One "jump in technology" that occurred during the 19th century would be the invention and rise of the telegraph machine. Another would be the rise of trains and steamboats as means of transportation. Daniel Walker Howe makes the point in his excellent book, What Hath God Wrought, that electronic telegraphs helped speed along a communications revolution (which also incorporated the spread of newspapers and periodicals with national readership) that led to the rise of mass political parties and transformed American culture and economy. To illustrate how revolutionary such a technology might have seemed to someone living in the 1700s, I think an extended quote from Howe's work might be good:

"Neither Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin (America's first postmaster general) two thousand years later knew anything faster than a galloping horse. Now, instant long-distance communication became a practical reality...The invention of electrical telegraphy, coming near the close of the period treated here, represented a climactic moment in a widespread revolution of communications. Other features of this revolution included improvements in printing and paper manufacturing; the multiplication of newspapers, magazines, and books, and the expansion of the postal system (which mostly carried newspapers and commercial business, not personal letters). Closely related to these developments occurred a simultaneous revolution in transportation: shortening travel times and dramatically lowering shipping costs. How these twin revolutions transformed American life will be central to the story told here. Their consequences certainly rivaled, and probably exceeded in importance, those of the revolutionary "information superhighway" of our own times."

This is taken from Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pages 1-3.