Second, the telegraph was the first product—really the foundation—of the electrical goods industry and thus the first of the science- and engineeringbased industries. David Noble’s America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977) implies throughout a sharp distinction between forms of engineering, such as civil engineering, grounded in a handicraft and guild tradition, and chemical engineering and electrical engineering, which were science-based from the outset. Much that is distinctive about the telegraph, from the organization of the industry to the rhetoric that rationalized it, derives from the particular nature of the engineering it brought into being. More to the point, the telegraph was the first electrical engineering technology and therefore the first to focus on the central problem in modern engineering: the economy of a signal.3