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This is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.
I disagree — Delco-Light was mostly for farmhouse lighting and appliances, not powering field telephones. Those clips were almost certainly battery-powered or used the fence line itself as a galvanic circuit. The power requirements were minimal anyway.
When I was a kid, I scavenged a hunk of cable "Ma Bell" had left behind. I spliced together a quarter mile pair of wires to connect the neighbors house to mine and hooked up a battery and microphone on one side, and a speaker on the other. No luck. Then we connected the "speaker side" to the input of my friends stereo, and it was possible to be heard. I was about 10 at that time ( ~1970) and was not very aware of voltage drop. The taps and recording system I put in our basement worked much better!
If you can get your hands on it, I recommend Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by the same author. She covers barbed wire as well as many other ways to communicate. The book itself is gorgeous.
I couple years ago I read "A Mind at Play", Soni & Goodman, a biography on Claude Shannon. He grew up on a farm and the book mentions how he made extensive use of barbed wire fence telegraph (and if I recall telephone). Perhaps one of the early experiences Shannon had regarding information.
The MIT Museum had a display (last year) of Shannon's "toys", including the famous mouse maze. I don't recall any mention of his early days using barbed wire telegraph though.
The barbed wire sections in that book are fantastic. Shannon didn't just use it—he apparently debugged signal degradation issues by walking the fence line and checking for rust spots or improper wire splices. That kind of hands-on troubleshooting mindset shows up throughout his later work on information theory.
> How does the electric fence gate lead to transistors?
> [ Relay, Electric gate, Flip-flop (electronics) ]
/? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
>Anecdotally, fence phones were still being used throughout the 1970s and perhaps even later. C.F. Eckhardt describes calling his parents who lived in rural Texas and still used a fence phone; their number was simply 37, designated on the small local network by three long rings and one short ring.
Is this perhaps an OCR or typography error? If the number were "31" that would make much more sense to encode as three long one short. A stylized 1 can look a bit like a 7 depending on how the characters are drawn.
We still run comms over steel wire today, only most of the time we don't know it, it's called CCS and makes for really cheap "copper" wire. For example a neighbour bought a roll of remarkably cheap Cat5 a few months back and, yeah, I don't think your ethernet cable should have a magnet able to stick to it.
If you look in vintage Sears catalogs - easily found online - I have a printed copy somewhere of the 1908 one and it's definitely in there - aftermarket phones had a bit of a "contraband" aspect to them, and were offered to be shipped in unmarked boxes. Not all local phone companies were "friendly" to people stringing up their own lines.
Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:
I talked with someone years ago who did networking deep in third world countries in the 90s and early 00’s. Hey said they would not-infrequently use wire fences for wiring up remote locations using X.25 because the protocol was highly tolerant of very noisy lines, and it was the only way to have any confidence the infrastructure wouldn’t just be ripped out the day after they left.
Shannon probably documented the failure modes too. Barbed wire doesn't care about your uptime SLA—storms, corrosion, livestock. Good luck troubleshooting a short across three counties at 2am.
I could be wrong, but I think the article conflates "barbed wire fence lines" with actual telephone lines strung alongside them. Most farmers weren't literally using the barbed wire itself as a conductor—they ran separate wire on the same fence posts. The impedance and signal loss would've been terrible otherwise.
