Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together | Hacker News Reader

Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together

atlasobscura.com

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99% Invisible did a great story on this called Devil's Rope [0]. It's pretty amazing what people were able to accomplish.

[0] - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/

Stories like this help me stay a little bit hopeful that if (or more cynically, when) the time comes, we can roll out independent mesh networks to connect ourselves. If our grandparents and great-grandparents could do it, why can't we?

Hell, ADSL works over a piece of wet string. https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html

Not a dupe but this was linked on both of these discussions five days ago:

Ethernet over barbed wire | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263

ADSL over wet string | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107

Astonishing how this article does not once use the phrase "party line".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)

My house had one of those in the UK in the 70's. My Nan had to give our neighbour a telling off for butting into a conversation with my mother.

my aunt and uncle's farm in interior BC had this setup until the late 90s, well into the 56K modem era. Remember other people in your house yelling at you to turn off the internet because they had to use the phone? Imagine that scaled up to a dozen houses :)

Small world. I spent some long weekends at a cabin on green lake (BC interior) with a party line.

Party lines used standard telephone lines. The joke was that they had nothing to do with the cost of the wire. The cost of the wire is a tiny part of the cost of installing the system. It was the phone company not wanting to install the switching gear. Sometimes the party line was tied together within BC-Tell's box. So when they installed better switching gear everyone suddenly had their own line. That's different than barbwire rigs that ran over single lines. (BC-Tell is now called "telus")

Pretty sure BC-Tel only has the one L in it.

In the days before Facebook, simply picking up the phone could well result in fun conversations with our neighbors. Fun times were had by all.

My folks power company buried the power lines in the rural areas to avoid trees falling and causing outages. They should have ran cable or fiber while doing this, total waste of man power and work. Too far for DSL but they have power.

Something else to bear in mind - most of these 'farmers lines' were one wire circuits - so single wire for talking, earth ground return, local talk battery at each instrument on the circuit too.

You'd get all sorts of atmospherics and other noises during even calm weather (more in storms) (squeals, howling sounds, humming sounds, etc) - figure you basically have an aerial, with an induction coil, a speaker and a mic.

Still beats yelling.

What about carrier pigeons?

Today, rural internet development is fairly often compared to delivering phone and electricity back in the day. It, too, is sometimes a homegrown affair because it isn't profitable to commercial establishments, yet can serve as a vital lifeline connecting isolated people to the larger world.

A friend's rural internet connection was getting 50kb throughput recently. It turned out the line was lying across an electric fence. Clearing it got him back up to his usual 1mb

Sounds similar to how amateur radio systems are used by people in rural places, or Fidonet, or other hacked together solutions to common problems. Ultimately these seem to be stopgap measures that are replaced by utilities in the long run.

Side comment, but I saw this on an HN comment about a week or two ago and since then I've seen it front page here, reddit, and other newsfeeds.

I wonder which of the following apply:

1) It's always been a popular post and I never noticed it

2) It was already catching fire and seeing it on HN was part of that spread

3) It became popular because of HN

Always curious to see the life cycle of how these things develope

Atlas Obscura send emails regularly with new stories, people post them when they get them.

It illustrates how delightfully simple an invention telephony is. I'm surprised with all the effort that went into improving telegraphy that nobody had stumbled upon it sooner.

Funny to see this as I just read about this curious telephony solution in the book "The Master Switch".

It's said that Claude Shannon experienced this growing up in rural Michigan.

edit: Apparently not North Dakota

What wasn't clear to me in the article was whether these lines were connected to the wider telephone system, or was isolated to the barbed wire locals.

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