Barbed wire fences were an early DIY telephone network

There's an nice anecdote from James Gleick's book _The_Information_ about Claude Shannon making a telegraph on a barbwire fence:

> "A curious child in a country town in the 1920s might naturally form an interest in the sending of messages along wires, as Claud Shannon did in Gaylord, Michigan. He saw wires every day, fencing the pastures--double strands of steel, twisted and barbed, structed from post to post. He scrounged what parts he could and jerry-rigged his own barbed-wire telegraph, tapping messages to another boy a half mile away. He used the code devised by Samuel F.B. Mores. That suited him. He like the very idea of codes--not just secret codes, but codes in the more general sense, words or symbols standing in for other words or symbols. He was an inventive and playful spirit. The child stayed with the man. All his life, he played games and invented games. He was a gadgeteer. The grown-up Shannon juggled and devised theories about juggling. When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Bell Laboratories had to leap aside to let a unicycle pass, that was Shannon. He had more than his share of playfulness, and as a child he had a large portion of loneness, too, which along with his tinkerer's ingenuity helped motivate his barbed-wire telegraph."

[Page 168 from my uncorrected galleys copy of the book]

Sears was the Amazon of the day. Order by mail, receive by rail shipment, completely bypass local retail infrastructure. In some case this meant unmarked crates to avoid trouble.

Here's a link to a catalogue page for DIY telephone equipment from those days. At least the link works for me right now.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&vi...

10BASE-T1L allows Ethernet over a single pair of cables at 1000m:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Sin...

Barbed wire might be a great invention but my personal experiences with it are not so rosy.

I was cleaning up my property and found some laying on he ground from where there once stood long rotten fence posts that had since decomposed completely.

While cleaning it up by wrapping it around a piece of wood, I learned the hard way that safety glasses are essential when working with it...An end of a strand in an almost lifelike manner whipped up and slashed me across the the bridge of my nose and my right eye lid.

That was but one experience, since that time I have had the pleasure of laying under my backhoe with bolt cutters to remove 100s of feet that ended up wrapped around the front axels and walking through puddles in my gum boots only to realize the dreaded stuff had struck again by putting invisible holes in the bottoms of them.

I believe I have managed to collect the majority of the abandoned wire but now I face the dilemma of what to do with it. I don't want to take it to the land fill and make it someone else's problem but don't want to have it in my way either as it is very heavy and cumbersome to move.

My only idea is to get a forge or smelter and transform it into a less menacing product.

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has a fantastic collection of barbed wire strands- well over a thousand different styles. I can't remember if it goes very deep into the fences serving as telephone networks, but seeing the variety of types and their evolution into a wire that could be cheaply mass-produced is fascinating and impressive.

My dad worked for the phone company his entire life. He told me that early in his career, in the early 1960s, he did the engineering to convert a lot of barb wire circuits to central office circuits. He also said the used to have huge bonfires to get rid of the old wooden crank phones. This was all in Southern Illinois, not the Wild West.

My first job out of school (in the '80's) was working for a company that managed the infrastructure for state lotteries. We ran the Texas lottery and, yes, we did occasionally have point of sale terminals drop off the network when a rancher forgot to close a gate.

Is there any more details somewhere on how this worked? I assume they required electricity but where did the electricity come from? Was it using same exact phone they had in cities at the time? Not even sure what connections were required for regular phones at that time either. Any info would be helpful for my curiosity.

This reminds me of a story about someone running a LAN from their house to a shed via a barbed wire fence. Apparently they got a fairly good data rate except when it was raining or a cow was leaning against the fence.

> "People would read the newspaper over the telephone," says MacDougall.

Copyright infringement. But nobody cared. That was the beauty of the Internet last century. The general public wasn't online (much), the impact of what happened on the Internet was limited. Even though 1on1 could be eavesdropped (like physical), nobody cares. Usually. And if they do, they will eavesdrop, that is still true nowadays (que NSO zero day reference), and probably justified (has to be within proportion of law).

I remember reading a brief note about some people somewhere in Africa running and X.25 network over barbed wire, and it’s been something I’ve wanted to try since.

That article references another one (that now 404s but is in web archive). Amazing story that mentions how people hooked up these systems to the normal one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110717074852/http://www.texash...

There's hope for rural areas under the iron grip of a single Internet provider.

I guess the other interesting thing is that these were likely single-wire earth return systems.

Why does this keep popping up on the dash here? I have seen it at least three times in the last few months. It is an interesting historical factoid, but there are plenty of others now more worthy of my attention.

What this highlights for me was the loneliness of the homestead-era West, and the many attempts by people to connect with each other across the empty acres.

It is an under-appreciated fact in America, and generally obscured by the Marlboro cowboy LARPing among certain cultural factions, that those who settled the West itself tried very hard to congregate, communicate and help each other in the face of harsh conditions. The loners didn't make it; the cowboys themselves were usually the hired help.

Settlements in the west tended to congregate more densely, when they could, than what you see in rural New England. I believe this is partially because much of the west is a desert or semi-arid desert, and communities formed near the scarce sources of water; whereas the northeast didn't face those constraints.

I used the barbed wire fence of the horse-ranch I was on, out in the bush, as an antenna for a broken TV I'd found ditched on the side of the road a few days prior .. I got through the static and tuned into RAGE, Cabaret Voltaire Sensoria, and was baptised in electrons for life ..