The history of barbed wire | Hacker News Reader

The history of barbed wire

slate.com

73 pointscurtis27 comments

This is one of the most interesting parts of the article to me:

Right around the same time that barbed wire was invented, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. At first, telephone companies were laying telephone wire in cities, but they weren’t interested in the rural market. But farmers also needed phones, which meant that they needed a network of wires to connect the farms.

Barbed wire fences could serve this purpose. The barbed wire couldn’t transmit a signal quite as clearly as a nice insulated copper wire, but for many years, it did the trick. A dozen or so farms might be connected on one system; for about $25, farmers could buy a kit to rig themselves into the network. In 1907 there were 18,000 independent telephone cooperatives serving nearly 1.5 million people. Because of this, farmers were some of the earliest adopters of telephone technology.

A great reminder that technological advances don't happen in a vacuum, and new innovations spread best if they can work over already existing infrastructures.

Around 1998 I was working for a small mom and pop computer/networking shop and had a customer successfully run Ethernet over barbed wire so he could network between his house (where the main computer was) and his barn.

It was about a fifty foot run at 1Mbps. He did have issues when it rained, once the posts got wet enough to ground the wires.

I knew rain affected wifi cantennas, now it messes with wired networking too.

Only if your wires are exposed

How on earth did he manage that? Didn't the barbs cause shorts where they touched the individual twisted metal strands?

Cisco actually demonstrated Ethernet over barbed wire (and other materials) back in '02.

http://slashdot.org/story/02/01/03/2039218/ethernet-over-ass...

Barbs are wrapped around the twin wires, yes, but the twin wires are already touching each other. But a fence will usually have more than one strand of wire (though not always barbed) - I imagine one stand was Tx and a different strand was Rx.

Yes. That was more or less how he did it.

Spliced some coax to alligator clips. One strand for the inner, one strand for the outer (if memory serves).

If you haven't yet read "How We Got to Now", I think you'd really like it. What you've concluded is one of the major themes of the book. I thought it was fascinating.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INIXU5I/

I sort of imagine barbed wire has a high resistance. Not sure how they could effectively send and receive signals across it for any meaningful distance, but really cool!

If you have a taste for stories that span the spectrum of airport carpeting fanboys to those with more historical significance such as the story here, I cannot recommend the 99% invisible podcast enough.

Web - http://feeds.99percentinvisible.org/99percentinvisible

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id394775318

To list a couple others off the top of my head: SF's public stairways, NYC's cow tunnels, sound design for televised sports, Plimsoll lines, elevator brakes, architecture for deaf people.

I don't know if I'd call it a "spectrum" so much as a "crazy pile of everything design related." Great show.

I was just going to mention this too.

One of the best Podcasts out there IMO. Great "short" stories/history lessons.

Any particular reason this is being linked to slate.com instead of 99 Percent Invisible's own site? There does not appear to be any additional content and they are missing a correction update.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/

Glidden’s design took off, and by 1876, his company was producing nearly 3 million pounds of barbed wire annually.

Sentences like this always bother me. Of what use is this information? Barbed wire isn't used as a counterweight. How much fence is 3 million pounds?

Basic barbed wire is ~80 lbs per quarter-mile roll (1,320 ft) according to http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/resmgmt/publist/300Series/307100-1....

So 3 million lbs would be 9375 miles, or 15000km

15,000km makes more sense than 3 million lbs.

Thanks a lot for the distraction! Assuming that the wire has a diameter of 2.5mm, there are two strands, and shortening by 1/3 accounts for the loss due to the twist and accounts for the mass of the barbs.

Probably something like 9,000 miles[1]

Of many metrics, the length might not be that interesting. For instance how much land did that represent making safe for crops, and conversely how much territory was ruined for grazing?

While there isn't demand for barbed wire for as a counterweight, it does add some context on the supply side. The 173 m^3 of steel is about 0.3% of the steel used to construct the Three Gorges Dam, and 20% of the steel used to construct the Eiffel Tower[2]

[1] Wolfram|Alpha seems to change the syntax handling from month to month, but for now using weight/density of steel treats it like a physical object unlike "volume of steel" which returns market trading volumes.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%283e6+lbs+%2F+density+...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=173+m^3

Note: it's cool how two different back-of-the-napkin calculations gave a very similar result.

I guess barbed wire was sold by weight, just like nails are to this day (see for example http://www.diy.com/search/results/?question=nails)

I also guess that many nail manufacturers produced barbed wire.

They made a documentary about barbed wire and Glidden and the town where he manufactured it Dekalb, Illinois. Its called Barbed Wire Pioneers.

I briefly attended Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, this article brought back many "fond" memories of attending college in a corn field where barbed wire was a source of pride.

The conflict between cowboys and farmers is still going strong over 100 years later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff

A conflict born from such a small technological change. Managing land is tricky.

I would characterize that more as a freeloader deciding he wasn't being subsidized enough by the taxpayer, then declining to pay the tiny pittance the BLM levies for the privilege of overgrazing the deserts of the West. That he was able to hoodwink a bunch of city slickers eager to signal their "conservatism" by opposing the gub'ment no matter what, says more about them than about him.

"Bundy has said he does not recognize and will not submit to federal police power over land that he believes belongs to the "sovereign state of Nevada."[28] He said: "I abide by all Nevada state laws. But I don't recognize the United States government as even existing.""

That has nothing to do with cowboys and farmers and more to do with a being a massive trespasser and all around freeloader.

Almost every time a 99% Invisible episode comes out, I can expect an article about the same thing pop up on HN a week later. Kinda funny.

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