And, as the texts referenced throughout this essay suggest, writings related to the telegraphone are incredibly pedagogical in character, regardless of genre. One obvious reason for this pedagogical tenor is that not many consumers had access to the telegraphone. Another reason is that the device involved a magnetization process unfamiliar to most audiences. And yet another is that, quite early on, numerous people wanted to exhibit expertise in an emerging field, particularly its technical language. For Reeve and Fankhauser, didactic displays not only informed audiences; they also publicly performed authority, something key to the persona of a professor, the reputation of a detective, the success of an innovator, or the pitch of a business agent. As Carolyn Marvin (1985, 49) argues, “control of technical language was a means for experts to establish themselves as arbiters of the domain of technological reality and, from that strength, to seize the larger domain of social reality.” Equal to a professional education acquired through a setting like the Franklin Institute was a demonstrable knowledge of how to speak technically, how to use language to model a specific community of practice (49).