The first magnetic recorder, the telegraphone, was invented in 1898 in Denmark. Despite favorable publicity and considerable investment, the telegraphone was a commercial failure. This article uses the theoretical concept of “frames of meaning” to explain that failure, focusing on three factors in particular: Denmark's status as a technologically peripheral country, the telephone orientation of the telegraphone's inventors, and management failures by the firm set up to manufacture the machine.

Shrewd product selection allowed Spencer Love to build Burlington Mills into a large profitable firm in what most observers regarded as a declining industry, textiles. Using integration, diversification, and a multidivisional structure, he then attempted to have Burlington dominate its industry just as a few other large corporations controlled steel, automobiles, and chemicals. In textiles, however, powerful forces constrained and sometimes defeated these strategies. After the emergence of artificial and synthetic fibers, textile mills became dependent on large yarn manufacturers in the chemical industry such as Du Pont and Celanese. In addition, large size and diversification did not always protect a company's profits, and forward integration into the volatile women's garment industry proved to be especially dangerous. In the end, Love concluded that Burlington should remain a weaving and knitting company; when he died in 1962, textiles remained an industry in which small, specialized firms survived alongside the corporate giants.