Invention: Barbed Wire

of course I think of barbed wire barriers often. Uh. In particular, I think about barbed wire that is uh like in the woods, uh, you know, wrapped around old trees, and the it kind of grow the tree has grown around the barbed wire in this kind of grotesque way, but also the the tree is kind of conquering the barbed wire, So I think of that. I of course think of metal fences, the tops of metal fences, particularly to keep people out of the industrial areas. You see

that a lot in the urban environment. And then of course I think about its use and say hell raised or horror films, you know, event Horizon, or of course the violent stunts that you see perpetrated sometimes in professional wrestling. I definitely assumed there was a pro wrestling angle that led you to this topic. Yeah, well no, no, I wouldn't say that that led me to the to the topic. I'm not sure what exactly, you know, I can't remember what made me think this would be a good one

to look into. Um. Probably, I mean, part of it could be just the fact that there is barbed wire everywhere. We we tend to not see it even as we see it. And I mean part of that is just the nature of say a barbed wire fence or or or cyclone fencing. This topped with barbed wire, is that, of course you can see through it, you can see

what's on the other side. To a certain extent, it is it is almost invisible, but yet it is there, and it is uh, you know, if you've stopped to really think about it, it's it's quite an oppressive presence to have in the world around to its peak hostile architecture. Yeah, because you know, just to go a little deeper, um, in terms of associating barbed wire with what it's been used for, I mean, we we have to realize that it's been used to divide up the natural world and

enforce artificial barriers to both wildlife and humans. It's been used to enforce contested borders. It was used to create the physical barriers of Nazi prisoner of war camps, and most infamously of all the fences of concentration and death camps during the Holocaust. It's used to enclose human prisoners, and in all of its uses against humans and with human populations, I mean, it carries with it the threat of ripped and torn flesh. It doesn't just prevent you

from crossing. It threatens you. I mean it says not just like I'm going to make it hard for you to get past this point, but it says you will get injured if you try to get past this point. It will be difficult and or unpleasant. Uh, So you'd better stay on your side of the fence, your side of the barbed wire. Now all that is, you know, kind of dark and grotesque and oppressive and so forth. Um, but the entire episode is not necessarily going to be

as grim. Barbed wire has a pretty fascinating history, uh in the United States and in Europe. And we'll get into that even as we discuss its its uses and and also some of the times and places where people tried to make it a little more, a little tamer, I guess, but generally barbed wire is still going to be barbed wire, uh, no matter how you twist it. So as usual, let's first talk about what came before

barbed wire. Okay, I figured this is a good place to call out one of the main sources that we're going to be referring to in this episode, which was a good chapter on the history of barbed wire in a book called The Devil's Rope, A Cultural History of barbed Wire by Alan Krell, who is an associate professor at the School of Art History and Art Education at the University of New South Wales. And so a lot of this book is actually more in the kind of

art history realm is talking about symbolism and stuff. But but he he works Jesus of Nazareth into the first chapter. Well, it's interesting when you look at like the early days of barbed wire, what was the closest precedent you might find in the imagery around you for this twisted, thorny strand of material. It was probably going to be like the crown of thorns that you would see on Jesus's

head in medieval artwork. Yeah, yeah, so so it's really is a natural um transformation to go from uh, from a crown of thorns to potentially, you know, like crown of barbed wire, which is the author points out, like you see this kind of imagery thrown around even in the early literature about barbed wire. So uh, for the most part, we're talking about inventions and innovations of the

nineteenth century here. Prior to the nineteenth century, humans obviously had a robust collection of barrier technologies up their sleeves. Wall infants technologies extend back to ancient time, and we mentioned a lot of this in our previous invention episode on walls. Among the earliest known defensive walls are the ancient walls of Mesopotamia, specifically those constructed in the twenty first century b c. E. By this by the Sumerian

rulers Shulgi and Shu sin Uh. And of course this would refer to the earliest like territorial border wall we can find evidence of now, Like if you're just talking about defensive walls for like castles or towns or buildings, that's much much older. That's going to go back many centuries. Yeah, And as for fencing itself, and it is in the construction of fences as opposed to full on walls. Uh, The ancient history here is also murky and impossible to

nail down. I was looking at old fences in Archaeology by Arnie Innarison, presented at the eighty fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, and the author points out that fences are just a prominent feature of most cultural landscapes and that they frequently play to land division and on farm grazing management. So, you know, it stands to reason that we can we can roughly, I guess, think of fencing as a product of the agricultural revolution.

But on the other hand, nomadic herdsmen seemingly made use of animal pins and essentially fences as well in their temporary settlements. So it really goes back far in human history. There is no you know, no individual person or culture we can point to and say, hey, they came up with fencing. Yeah, And I think when you go back farther into history, most fencing is going to be for

the control of animals rather than for the control of humans. Yeah, you're talking about just mild barriers to make managing your your various domesticated animals a little easier, so let's fast forward a bit all the way to nineteenth century see America and Europe, but specifically America, because this is where we encounter the the European settler's dream of manifest destiny, the idea that here is the American frontier spread before us, and it is it is ours for the taking by

divine right. And part of this, uh, this whole vision, of course, is the idea that you just have these these vast empty stretches of land. Right. Of course, in reality, these lands were far from unoccupied. Uh. There were, of course animals living there, as with any you know, any of the continents, you have large megafauna that that required large areas to roam around in. But you know, also had native peoples that had lived here for at least

fifteen thousand years. But in spite of all that, you know, it was decided that everybody was going to get a chance to have a piece of this unclaimed frontier. So, as Eleanor Commins outlined in a Brief History of barbed Wire for Popular Science, Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two opened it up for any American to claim uh one sixty acres of public land per citizen. All you had to do is go out there claimant. And of course, what are you gonna do, Maybe throw a

fence around. And so the land was divided, the land was worked and transformed. And if you're looking to keep animals on your property uh and or keep other animals off of it, it does pay to build some fences. But while the American Frontier wasn't all empty planes and you know barren, uh, you know, the Great American Desert and so forth, there are still plenty of areas where there is a lack of trees and wood. And therefore

it made traditional fences a difficult proposition. And it also took you know more, It took longer than was comfortable in many cases to gross a hedgerows to serve as natural barriers. And so settlers begin to experiment with the use of wire for fencing. And this makes sense, right You use less wood uh and or depend on fewer post trees this way. Plus, despite the weight metal, wire travels rather well. Yeah, wire is a pretty natural solution here.

Wire fencing is less likely to be harmed by the weather. It doesn't get blown down by high winds because it doesn't have a flat side to catch the gales. It doesn't get weighed down by snow in the terer, it doesn't catch fire if it gets struck by lightning. Wire fencing is kind of a perfect solution for the planes. Yeah, and it you know, it doesn't last forever, but it

certainly stands the test of time. I mean, I feel like a lot of my childhood involved encountering old wire fences or barbed wire fences that no longer have any purpose. They're just there in the woods or you know, and they're just they have survived, while everything else is just a ghost of of whatever settlement it was a part of. It was one of my favorite kinds of things to discover as a good kid. You know, I would roam through the woods and you'd find like a half buried

old barbed wire fence. Yeah, it's like that, maybe a sunken grave, and of course, you know, like a line of of buttercups that still come up marking some walkway to a lost house of some sort. But there is a downside to wire fences, which is that they're not super strong, especially if you know they might be strong for a human to try to get through. But imagine

you are a bull or a bison. Yeah, large animals like this, a cow, bison, a horse, they can simply tear into it, make a mess of it, and maybe get tangled up in it. But in the fence itself would be reduced to shambles and would no longer serve its purpose. And and of course, if you were at all concerned about humans, you know, a wire fence like this is not going to really be uh, you know, any kind of an obstacle for humans either. So they

quickly realized what was lacking here. Spikes, right, passive weapons, just just some static pokers to sit there and hurt you if you if you press too hard. So an American farmer and businessman named Joseph Glidden is often given credit for the invention of barbed wire, and he does play a very important role in the history of barbed wire, But it looks like there were a number of inventions of similar types of fencing material before Glidden swooped in.

So we really need to take a pretty large step back before we get to Glidden. So we will get to him in a bit. One of the first things I thought we should mention since we're still sort of in the what came before phase, is the idea of live fencing or live fence. Specifically a species of plant known as Maclura pomifera, commonly known as the osage orange or the hedge apple tree. You ever seen a hedge apple? Oh? Yeah, yeah, they're fun to kick down the road. Yeah. I never

tried to eat one. I wonder what they taste like. I don't know. I never tried either. I bet they're nasty. This was a thorny hedge plant that could be and was used as a kind of natural barbed wire to form boundaries and barriers, but it had many problems. You could try to aligne your fields with osage orange, but it was difficult to maintain. It required a lot of trimming, like it can, you know, shoot out big branches all over the place, and it in in Krell's words, quote

harbored noxious weeds. So the question is can you recreate some of the desirable qualities of this thorn hedge through industrial means or synthetic means. And despite the historical association between barbed wire and the American ranch land frontier, it seems that a number of French inventors preceded the Americans. There were at least two French patents on barbed wire that came before any patents in America, and then another one that came before most patents in America. So let's

let's look at France for a second right now. Now. I will point out though that the Krell doesn't seem to think that there's necessarily any connection between the French and the American inventions. They have came up come up with these independently. So imagine it's one of those things you can you can ultimately explain just in terms of, you know, the material science reaching a point where people could could innovate with it, or the demand whether there'd

be a situation where this suddenly appears useful. And what's fascinating here is that the way that it's useful varies pretty greatly from Europe to the America's that's right. So in the year eighteen sixty there was a Frenchman named Lance Eugene Grassain Batilon who acquired a patent for quote

grating of wire work for fences and other purposes. And I've got an illustration for you to look at here, Robert, but this consisted of quote, a system of twisted iron employing a flat thin wire known commercially as ribbon iron, that could be applied to everything that ought to be enclosed or fenced. And this, Krell says, this would include railing for parks, railroads, meadows, gardens, pavilions, and even trees. Like, God, imagine that world, you know, it's just a barbed wire

fence for every tree. Yeah. Like, if it's not clear already that the focus here is not so much on wandering cattle but on people, yes, uh. And Krell says that most historians have kind of ignored Grassain Batilon, but his patent was the first to describe the common feature

of twisted wire with sharp projections. Grassian Battalon called these projections bristling points, and Krell is careful to point out that gb here didn't describe the material as something that you would make fencing out of, but rather as something that would be mounted on top of a normal fence to make it harder to climb over, which is exactly how we see barbed wire used at And of course it's cousin razor wire used today, something you can put at the very top of a non barbed fence like

you know, cyclone fencing, etcetera, to make it difficult to climb over. Right, So you want to put fencing around all the trees in your city or something, you put this on top of the fence around all the trees. Beautiful. But after this there were more frenchmen to follow with ideas for barbed wire. There was another guy named Louis Francois Janine who was awarded a patent in April eighteen sixty five. So five years later, UH was awarded a patent for barbed wire of a kind of different design.

Here the fence would consider list of double twisted wire with diamond shaped barbs made out of flat pieces of sheet metal. So this isn't uh, this isn't gonna be a little like poker sticking out like thorns. This is going to be more like sharp flat pieces of metal embedded in the wire as it goes along, sort of little diamond shaped blades. Yeah. Well, one of the really interesting things to come out of researching this episode was just that how many different types of barbed wire have

been devised? Hundreds? Yeah, it's it's it's amazing and We'll get more into some of the variety as we go here. I mean, I think there were hundreds, just between like eighteen sixty seven and eighteen seventy four. Uh So, a later patent was filed by a brick manufacturer from Brittany. And not to be confusing, if you don't know, Brittany is in western France, It's not in Britain. Uh Brittany and Western France. And this guy was named Gilbert Gavellard.

This was granted in August eighteen sixty seven, and it was for Gavellard's Brevede in Vineon, which describes a fence composed of runt says, oh my, my French has failing me. Here run says artificial, meaning artificial thorns. There would be things that would be uh quote caught between three strands of intertwined wire. Uh This brings to mind a description

that that Krell shares. He he He discusses the powerful Washburn and Mowan Manufacturing company out of Massachusetts, which was a big like a major producer of barbed wire and of course a major marketer of barbed wire. They put put out some some gloriously over the top descriptions of of barbed wire the perfect fence, And one of the quotes from the Perfect Fences quote, the steel barb is nothing more than a thorn, the spur the animal instantly

retreats from and thereafter carefully avoids. Yeah, it is compared to a thorn. Again and again emphasis on the natural. Uh. I was about to say the natural nature, the the natural nous of the thorn. Michael Kelly of New York, who received a patent for a barbed wire design on February eleven, eight sixty eight, writes of his invention quote, my invention relates to imparting defenses of wire a character approximating to that of a thorn hedge. I prefer to

designate the fence so produced as a thorny fence. And you know, you read these arguments, and what could be more natural? You're not making something grossly artificial, um an industrial. No, You're you're taking something that the world does naturally, that vegetation does naturally, and just applying it a little more towards your specific aim. Well, yeah, I wonder if grass Saint Battalan was anticipating somebody like me who's horrified by the idea of a barbed wire fence around every tree.

Because when he's talking about his proposal for tree guards, he writes that they quote maybe of double ribbon wire, which allows the addition of small wire points, and when these ribbons are twisted together, the wire points bristle in every direction and form spikes, imitating thorn branches. It's just saying it's like another part of the tree. It's just like a plant. Yeah, you can well imagine him today saying naturally trees grow upward and uh and reach towards

the heavens. Why not also helped transmit wireless signals for our telephones? What could be more natural? Uh huh. But it's funny, I mean, and we're not even really brushing the surface of all the different marketing materials and patents and uh and advertisements and everything that described barbed wire as a thorn, that they were obsessed with this idea that it's just like a thorn bush, it's just like a brier. And I wonder if I wonder where a

lot of these comparisons are coming from. I think some of it must be coming from like trying to make it seem more humane, more natural, less like some kind of gross metal claw that's invading your environment, right, And then some of the literature too, is really just pressing just how cultured it is, how essential it is to have fencing. The fencing is the thing that separates us from the savages, of which you know, as um as Krall points out, as just you know, steeped in the

language of of of of you know, European colonists. Yes, And Krell also shows these advertisements from the time that that sort of envisioned barbed wire as the demarcation line of a kind of controlled arcadia where he where he would depict people walking along lanes where they would be

surrounded by beautiful plants. And then also just like menageries of animals all mixed together, like elephants and camels and horses and dogs and stuff, all in the same pins, but they're all separated from these lanes by this elegant looking barbed wire. And and so it's like, I don't know, it's it enforces this theme of like man versus beast and humankind versus nature, and we contame it and put it in the box and control it with these artificial

with these industrial thorns, these thorns of human ingenuity. Yeah, there's one point where Krell is dealing with this, uh, this illustration by one of the barbed wire um master's uh there of a of a cow trying to eat an apple, but is prevented from reaching that apple in this you know, otherwise, you know, a pristine garden environment by barbed wire fencing, which he compares then to the garden of Eden and the and the you know, the tree of knowledge of good and evil and so forth,

which which is maybe a bit of a stretch, but but still I like, I like the argument if we just had one of those tree guards in the garden, there wouldn't have been a fall, right, Yeah, the fences order and uh and in the opposite of order is chaos. Right, So maybe we should take a quick break and then we come back. We can explore the year that the that the damn broke on the barbed wire flood. All right,

we're back. So, as we mentioned earlier, you had the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two that really opened up the the American the Great American Desert. And it's in the wake of this that we began to see this this real uh, this real rush right right. It seems that something happened around the year eighteen sixty seven, because that's the year that a ton of barbed wire patents

began popping up in the United States. We mentioned that the first patent was in France in eighteen sixty there was another one in eighteen sixty five, and then in eighteen sixty seven the American floodgates open. There were so many barbed wire patents and designs that that popped up between around eighteen sixty seven and running into the mid eighteen seventies. And again we we mentioned earlier some of the demands that might have put pressure on this invention.

You've got the continued colonization of the western prairie lands, the desire for farmers to keep animals in and or keep animals out of their fields in a place where lumber was scarce and the weather could easily damage a solid wooden fence. Anyway, wire fencing was kind of this perfect solution. And then the barbs. Meanwhile, we're there to discourage animals from knocking down the wire fencing. So who were some of these early American inventors of the industrial thorn.

There are honestly too many to name here, but just to mention a few There was a guy named Alfonso Dab of Elizabeth Port, New Jersey, and he got a patent in April eighteen sixty seven for an improvement in pickets for fences and walls. And this would be like you've got a wrought iron mounting strip and you could put this on top of an existing fence or an existing wall, and this would be too in in Dab's words, quote,

stop juveniles or others from climbing them. So these are these are anti human spikes that you would put on top of a fence. And you attached to a picture of this for our notes here, And really they look more like spearheads or bayonnets or something to that effect, less like like anything we would identify as barbed wire. Yeah, these are less for agriculture. These are something that would go on top of an existing fence and they would

poke your butt if you tried to climb over. Uh. And then in the same year, but a little a few months later, in June eighteen sixty seven, a Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, came up with a barbed wire invention, which Smith describes thus lee quote posts of cast iron between which two or more stout wires are strung tightly, which wires are provided with spools a few feet apart and protected with short projecting points. Um and this is

so quote offensive. This kind can be constructed very cheaply and will turn animals readily, as they can see it better than the ordinary wire fence, which has nothing attached to the wires to attract attention. And the animals will not counter the spurs or the spools, So this is

kind of interesting. Smith is saying. Not only will these spurs poke the animals if they press against the fence and and deter them there, it will also make the fence more visible to the animals, so that they won't need to poke up against it brush against it by accident. They'll be able to see it more easily than they would see just plain smooth wire. And Another early American patent for something counting as a barbed wire fence belonged to an inventor named William D. Hunt of New York

In This was awarded in July eighteen sixty seven. The design here is a little bit different from the barbed wire we're familiar with. It was conceived as a farming and ranching innovation, and from Hunt's patent, he describes it as quote, the spurs fit the wire loosely so as to revolve easily upon it. By providing the wire with these sharp spur wheels, animals are deterred from pushing against

the fence or attempting to break over it. And so this would not be twisted wire forming little artificial thorns, but rather it would be a smooth wire along which are strung like beads, these little kind of like saw blade looking things that can rotate freely around the wire, and then they would be held basically in place by the little studs on the wire. Yeah, kind of like

little ninja throwing stars. Right. And you know this one also, this one looks kind of neat actually the illustration, and I can imagine it being kind of, you know, shiny and decorative if it was deployed in a way that would you know, perhaps be pleasing to the eyes, but also, coming back to that previous point, perhaps highly visible to animals. Yeah, and I think this might actually be a slightly more

humane version of barbed wire. I'm not sure because I haven't tried it myself, but it would still provide a painful resistance if say, cows tried to press up against it. But because the sharp spur rotates freely around the wire, it seems a lot less likely than the barbed wire were used to catch and tear skin. Does that make sense, Like, it's not a hook going into you. It's just a sharp little thing, and and the fact that it rotates means it you know, it might hurt to press against it,

but it's not going to stay in you. Now, there's a great thing that's quoted in Krell's book, which is Hunt describing his inspiration for the invention, which was basically he had had trouble with a very stubborn mule, and he said, quote, I made up my mind that one young mule couldn't beat me. So one day the idea

suggested itself to me. Somehow, I don't know as I can tell how that a wire fence might be bird as I called it, then barbed as it has been changed too since, And I thought it would make a good thing. The reason why I thought so was that this mule would press against a thing and stand so obstinate it would hang against the board of a fence. And I thought, if I had something sharp, he wouldn't crowd it so hard. H So bird fencing colon a good thing, well at least a hunt it was, you know,

when you got a stubborn mule. But there are many problems with the early designs for barbed wire fencing. A lot of these designs beginning in eighteen sixty seven might have been effective if they were used, but there were problems with the production. The barbs had to be created and placed along the wire by hand, and this was

extremely laborious, potentially dangerous or painful for the worker. It would have made production of the wire slow and expensive because you're basically having to make a necklace every time he's stringing up some some wire if you're having to beat it with these little sharookens and so forth. Right, So, the next major revolution in barbed wire, I think, was less about how effective the specific wire design was at controlling animals and more more about how the design could

be mass produced. And this is where Joseph Glidden comes in. This is where everything seems to change. In the year eighteen seventy four, Joseph Glidden patented the first design and for barbed wire that would ever become a huge commercial success. According to Krell, in eighteen seventy four, just about ten thousand pounds of barbed wire were produced and sold. Six years later, in eighteen eighty, that figure was more than eighty million pounds. Uh, there's a there's a great line

from Glinden's marketing. Uh. He claimed that this his wire was quote lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust. Well that taps into another thing that I think is common in barbed wire marketing, which is, I think pretty straightforward appeals to kind of masculinity marketing. There's like very

gendered marketing with barbed wire, you know what I mean. Well, I mean it was it was pretty obvious that it was going to be um, a male audience that was going to be buying this barbed wire for for a variety of reasons. But yeah, there's this whole again, the man versus nature attaining of the wilderness um for the most part. But we will get into a major divide on that as we move forward. Sure, So what was

Glidden's mass production method? Well, it involved taking two strands of wire and twisting them around each other while barbs were automatically strung along one one of the two wires and then held in place by the wrapping of the second wire. It's a pretty ingenious method. Yeah, it's it's basically an example of what we we come to see as the standard in barbed wire, and that is the sense of barbed wire is a kind of not that is formed as opposed to something that is manufactured by

the beating of spikes and so forth. Exactly. Yeah. Now, there was a huge amount of legal battling over barbed wire patents, but Glidden managed to come out ahead in all of this with his mass production method. His barbed wire not was also pretty straightforward. By the way, about the legal battle, there is a whole history here with this sort of battle royal that all these various American

individuals will get into that in a minute. I was actually I was running across art goals in the New York Times from the day where they were had updates to the legal battle. Yeah, it was a crazy drama. And we'll even get to some poetry about that drama in a minute. Uh. Now, there's another interesting fact here, which is that there are some versions of the story that point out Joseph Glynden's wife Lucinda Warren Glidden's role in this. Apparently, Lucinda helped Joseph figure out the process

that would set his barbed wire apart. So first, Glinton used his wife's hairpins to twist sharp points that he tried to attach to a piece of straight wire. But like many other barbed wire inventors before him, he came across a problem, which was that the hairpin barbs kept slipping down the length of the wire. They couldn't be held in place. So to describe what happened next, I'm

gonna quote from Krell quote. Turning next to a coffee meal retrieved from their kitchen, Glinden converted it in such a way that by cranking it he could produce a uniform barb. The problem of the sliding barbs was finally resolved when he hit upon the idea that a second wire might secure them if it were twisted around the first.

To this end, he converted an old grindstone into a rudimentary twisting device, and, with the help of Lucinda, who turned the grindstone while he held the wire, proceeded to make the first sixty six feet of barbed wire in their backyard. Also thank you, husband for turning every device in our house into a barbed wire construction method. Yeah. From then on, the coffee taste like barbed wire. Now.

Another interesting individual in all this was John Warrene Better Million Gates Boy, so named because it said that he'd

take bets on whether cows could break through his wire. Uh. And apparently there was some criticism that he was maybe using really lazy cows or and I was reading some sort of back and forth in this, but either way, he became quite rich off the product, though he engaged apparently at times in the sale of quote moonshine wire, which if I'm understanding correctly, would have been like kind of like bootleg design wires barbed wire recipes that he

wasn't actually uh you know, legally supposed to be selling. The amount of anguish over bootleg or like scalped barbed wire is one of the most shocking things I discovered in this. Like there was great passion about the intellectual property disputes of barbed wire in the eighteen seventies and eighties. And and this is because Glidden was not the only person to invent to invent a barbed wire in the eighteen seventies or or to invent an effective mass production

system for barbed wire. There was another inventor named Jacob Has who came up with a similar process to Glinten's in the same year, but Glinden won the legal battle over precedence. In fact, there were at least three inventors, So you had Glidden, you had Jacob Hash, and then there was a hardware dealer named Isaac L. L. Wood, who were all involved in a long running I P dispute after they each tried to file patents for barbed wire.

After the three of them all visited the Decab, Illinois County Fair of eighteen seventy three, where the three of them all saw a display by a guy named Henry Rose which included a long strip of wood that had barbs attached to it, which could be used to keep an animal from pressing against defense. And so all three of them looked at this idea of Roses so like

a long wooden dowel with barbs on it. All three of them independently had the idea that it would make more sense to do the same thing, but put the barbs on a length of wire instead of a wooden rod, and then all three set to work trying to acquire a patent, and Glinden just happened to turn out the

big winner of this long and acrimonious dispute. But I think it's funny that like they're all fighting, they're fighting each other, and like they all basically got the idea from this other guy, that they just all had the insight that wire would work better than a than a wooden rod. But at some point the defeat inventor Jacob Hayes, who you know, who lost this intellectual property battle to

Joseph Glinton. He wrote a poem called be as Happy as you Can that is quoted in Krell's book This is so good, This life is not all sunshine as barbed fence scalpers have found. The crosses they bear are heavy, and under them lies no crown. And while they're seeking the roses, the thorns full offt they scan. Yet let them, though they're wounded, be as happy as they can. It's like the Bobby Fuller Four's letter dance of barbed wire. And in this we do have the the the crown

of Christ's damagery as well. Absolutely, But what comes out of this is that Glidden's version of barbed wire is probably correctly understood to be the progenitor of most existing types of barbed wire today. Yeah. In summary via Crell, it is accurate to say that barbed wire quote was born in France, independently conceived in the Eastern States of America, New Jersey, Ohio, and New York, and grew up on the prairies and planes where for different reasons, farmers especially

and later ranchers turned increasingly defensing. Alright, we're gonna take a break, but when we come back, we will continue to discuss barbed wire, and we'll even get into uh one or two examples of barbed wire used in a way that we might well describe as uh, I don't know, not evil. Yeah, I think that would be accurate. Alright,

we're back. So there are again many different varieties of barbed wire, and and one book that is that is often mentioned in UH in writings about the history of barbed wire is a book that was published in nineteen

seventy seven titled The bobbed Wire Bible. That's bob b O B B E d by Jack Glover published in seventies seven, and I think earlier as well, but I think maybe the addition I was looking at for was from seventy seven and it contains illustrations of seven hundred and thirty four different steel barbed wire knots, including things like scuts, wooden block, and the shin round line lock

barb uh and uh. If you if you can find a copy of this or just find some images of pages from this book, it's pretty fascinating because their their neat little illustrations and it just really drives home the diversity that went into envisioning all the ways that you could create a barb out of out of metal wiring. It's amazing how much human imagination went into lengths of

wire that can hurt you. Yeah. Now, a particularly nasty variation on all this is we mentioned razor wire briefly earlier, or concertina wire, which is either the same or very similar, depending on how specific you get in your barbed wire terminology. I thought concertina wire had to do with like how it was coiled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, but sometimes the words are Sometimes people say constantine wire, which is just

a perversion of the term. But but in these were really getting into anti human barbed wire varieties that you usually see used in military penal or border settings. The development and widespread use of this sort of wire really goes back to the First and Second World Wars, where

they were used in trench warfare environments and other fortifications. Yeah, and this does seem to be a change over time that like early on, most of the messaging about barbed wire is, as Kroll points out, this culture versus nature thing. It's humankind versus the untamed animal world, and you're putting these barriers in place to keep the animals in or

keep the animals out. Especially over the course of the twentieth century, barbed wire is it takes a much darker turn and we see it more and more deployed specifically for uses on humans to keep the humans in or to keep the humans out. Yeah. Absolutely. Now, one we mentioned earlier about like masculinity in the marketing and acceptance of barbed wire. One huge factor of the American West was that while farmers were very much in favor of

barbed wire, cattlemen were not. Because what does it do when you start throwing up miles and miles of barbed wire fencing, Well, it disrupts the open grazing lands. Uh, And it prevents cattle and horses from from moving around freely or you know, from cow prevents cowboys from moving a herd across a great distances. And on top of that, cattle and horses could get pretty messed up in barbed wire.

I mean, that's that's one thing that is often kind of uh skimmed over in the in the marketing material. Is that is that, yeah, the stuff can really cut up an animal and or a human and uh and and put them in some pretty put them in dire shape. Well, I think that's specifically a lot of the early advertising was trying to be misleading. That's why it kept emphasizing the thorn thing. It was. I think it was trying

to suggest your animals will not get hurt. You know, they will just uh, you know, it will just deter them. It's just true, we're just strategically deploying something that they would otherwise encounter naturally. But that's not really quite the case. Um So, cattleman did not really take kindly to barbed

wire for a very long time. It was also apparently decried by Texans is not only cruel and alien to the culture of the open range, but also as um as Krell points out quote a Yankee scheme to benefit the industrial North, which I don't know. I mean, you can you can certainly understand that point of view, right because look at some of the places it's coming from, So some of the birthplaces of the barbed wire industry.

You could easily see it's like, well, this is some stuff that's made up North, and they're bringing it down here, and they're just selling it to all these farmers, and it's just cutting up our land. And so this is this is like a whole part of of you know, sort of wild West history. I guess it wasn't that familiar with, but cattleman would would sometimes get fed up with it, and they'd go and they just cut down like miles of barb wired fencing, sometimes as part of

masked gangs working at night. And these masked gangs sometimes even had cool gang titles, um, And then they at first it was illegal fencing, but then they would also use these vigilante powers against legal fencing as well. And in terms of just sort of the humane or inhumane aspect of barbed wire, you had varieties of more humane barbed wire designs that were rolled out the idea of being that would be easier for a cattle to uh

to to be freed from them. Uh. Some one variety I was looking at in particular had blocks of wood that were in set in the wire as well. But this ended up not really taking off. And I imagine a big part of it is that it's just more manufacturing required um either on the industrial end or on the farmer's end, and therefore it just wasn't it wasn't picked up easier to stick with the crueler product in

this case. Also, Krall points out that the use of barbed wire against humans and animals led to a micro industry of barbed wire liniments and antiseptics such as silver pine healing oil or Dr Cox liniaments and antiseptic among others that basically like you know, kind of snake oil esque ointments. They may have done some good, but the healing power of Doctor Cox is on your barbed wire.

But our animals will be healthy as ever exactly. But I mean it really shows you like there was there were enough people and animals getting cut up by this stuff that there was a like a side industry of selling specialized ointments to deal with all those cuts. To humans and livestock. Yeah, totally. And as long as we're talking about the cultural impact, I mean, obviously, barbed wire I think came to be seen as one of the most iconic technologies symbolizing the brutal conquest of the North

American continent from from the native peoples who lived there. Yeah, this is where apparently the name the Devil's rope comes from. That was one of the the names for it that was used by the native peoples of North America. Some

of the Plains tribes called the Devil's rope. Yeah. And and speaking too of the of the pre colonial um uh you know a West, it's not only humans and domestic herds that were impacted, but also the American bison, which of course more famously suffered from over hunting, hunted to the you know, the brink of extinction, but also this ever expanding use of barbed wire also cut them

off from vital grazing and watering areas. So while the story of the invention of barbed wire is an interesting one, it's hard not to be left, uh, I don't know, when you just think about the impact of this technology left with a pretty depressing uh landscape. Yeah, yeah, and it it does literally make a landscape look depressing, uh,

at least the more you think about it. It's like, again, barbed wire is something especially if you've grown up around it, you can you can take it for granted, especially if it is not used so much against your you you know, if it's used sort of if it's used against livestock or again against um, you know, people in an outline group that you are not a part of. Perhaps you can you can people lying to its impact as well.

But um, yeah, for the most part, it's um, it's not an invention that I would really classify in the good category. However, there a couple of examples of of of uses for barbed wire, uh, both of which surprised me. The first of which is that while barbed wire couldn't transmit a signal as well as traditional telephone wire, which

is you know, insulated copper wiring. Uh. You still saw this case in the early nineteen thirties where rural farmers were some of the early adopters of this new technology of telephone lines, and for a few years they would they were actually using barbed wire because they had to build out their own telephone collectives and without access to easy access to all that insulated copper wire they had access to the to the barbed wire, they just string the barbed wire instead, which is which is in our

I wonder what this call sounded like, Well, probably pretty rough, probably just just clear enough to get by. Um. And then this is like just a few years before then it was replaced and also at that point of farmers were no longer required to string their own wiring. Now a more surprising use, though it was, is multiple cases that came across off in which barbed wire has been used for science. Um, so you have a great many studies that utilize strands of barbed wire. Usually it's like

a single strand to study bear populations. So basically what you have is a situation where researchers will use single strands of barbed wire to obtain for samples from wild bear populations for DNA testing. And this also entails baiting them a little bit, which according to Tom Dixon of Montana Outdoors, this would be a bottle that contains quote year old a year old fermented mix of cow blood and fish guts, which to human is pretty disgusting, but to a bear worth checking out. So yeah, this is

this is fascinating. So the idea, of course is not to to hurt the bear, and really not even necessarily to to like scrape into its skin, but to catch some of its fur. This ample, you know, fur armor that like a black bear has on its body. So the barrel come to check out the bait, and when it does so, the the barbs on the barbed wire will catch some of the fur and pull it free. And then researchers are able to use that fur and you know, look at the DNA and use it to understand,

you know, basically the shape of wild bear populations. So we can at least we can put that. Then another check under the positive uses of barbed wire in world history a way of caring for bear populations. I like it, but that's all I have. Sorry, it's just those two. That's those are the only examples there. It's also fun to play with, is it barbed wire? Kind of I don't know. When I was a kid, backyard wrestlers were playing with No, no, no, not not for it's I

don't know. It's just like kind of cool, like whip around and stuff. Oh well, I guess, um, I don't know. Well, it's fun to play with in the same way that like a good sticks fun to play with. Well, you know, I don't. Here's the thing I do remember, like kids, when when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada, the other kids, the older kids, the dangerous kids, were into two things. Michael Jackson. Uh those red uh leather jackets, you know, like Michael Jackson. Really yeah, those were very popular.

And then everybody was making They were making like a like a mace out of a stick of wood that had nails driven through it. So um, you know, they're just it was like The Lord of the Flies. I guess it sounds like an eighties movie. Yeah, it was it. This was the eighties. Were they on rollerblades? No, because the roads were all gravel where I was. I don't know what you would have done with a roller blade there, But I don't remember there being a lot of barbed

wire around it. If there had been, I'm sure they would have wrapped it around their makeshift melee weapons. Did they answer to Lord Humongous? They I'm sure they knew Lord Humongous he was. I think he was pretty popular at the time. Um, but yeah, I think that would have been the window for me encountering people playing with

barbed wire. For the most part, I think I was always like a little wary of it because when I would encounter barbed wire, either there was either there was a very good chance it was either like super rusty, uh and and therefore kind of icky, or it might be electrified and therefore I really don't want to touch it. Of course, that's that's another feature we didn't even mention about barbed wires that's strong properly, then you can put

an electric current through it, which adds to its effectiveness. Yeah, And I think in some cases us to like especially in ranching or you know, livestock control whatever, places where you would once have barbed wire have been replaced mostly with electric fence because if you have an electric current going through it, you need not have actual barbs because

you have electric barbs. But I will come back to what I said earlier, is that I think that our attitudes toward barbed wire, you know, they're going to really revolve around our own experience and like the area in which we encountered it. So I'd love to hear from listeners out there, like what, how how do you interact with barbed wire, Like, what is what comes to mind when you think of barbed wire? And to what extent is it influenced by the way it is used in

your rural setting and your urban setting? Uh as it's used in say you know, prison environments, or you know border environments, or uh used in in in uh you know in warfare, fortifications, etcetera. I'd love to hear from everybody on these on these points. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention, including that that episode that we did on walls, for example, you can head on over to invention pod dot com. That will shoot you over to the I heart listing

for this show. But you can find us absolutely anywhere wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be Just a rate you and subscribe. Those are some acts you can you can do that really help us out. Also, tell a friend, if you enjoy Invention, tell another human being about the show and perhaps they'll enjoy it as well. And I'm suddenly remembering we didn't even get into tattoos.

How many tattoos of barbed wire are there? And then I wonder are people really appreciating all the varieties of barbed wire. If you're thinking of getting a barbed wire tattoo, stop and go, get go, Get that book that I mentioned earlier with the seven hundred and something different varieties of barbed wire, and just just look around a little bit, do a little shopping, a little window shopping before you decide on a particular brand of barbed wire that is

gonna be tattooed around your bicep. Get one of the French varieties. Yeah. Huge, Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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