The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances

The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.