a brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks

The history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented.

Barbed wire was originally proposed as an inexpensive and potentially painful material that could be used to create a fence and thus act as a deterrent to keep livestock within a confined area and/or to keep out intruders.

The price of wire fell from twenty cents per pound in 1874 to two cents a pound by 1893 .

A fence phone, also referred to as a barbed wire fence phone or squirrel lines, is the use of “smooth” (presumably copper) wire running from a house to nearby barbed.

fencing to create an informal, ad hoc, cooperative, non-commercial, local telephone network.

Two key developments in the 1890s led to its adoption primarily by farmers, ranchers and those living in rural or isolated areas especially in the U.S. and Canada .

The line was used for a “woman operator” to notify a worker at the end of the line “when to send down a head of water and how much” The fence phone systems also thrived in areas known for having cooperatives .

Anecdotally, fence phones were still being used throughout the 1970s and perhaps even later.