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.
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.
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.
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!
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.