But if the engineering organization was the first requirement, it was soon outstripped in functional importance by the marketing apparatus.  The first great integrated corporations, which began to appear in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, were constructed on the basis of a new approach to the marketing problem, and it is not too much to say that after the assurance of basic engineering requirements it was this revolutionary marketing approach that served as the basis for the monopolistic corporation….The fundamental corporate innovation in this area was the national marketing organizations they established as part of their own structures, organizations which were soon to become international (181).