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A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
In need of a practical way to overcome social isolation; communicate emergencies, weather, and crop prices; and chafing under attempts to curtail free speech, ranchers and farmers began to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of both telephone sets and barbed wire fencing. Reportedly, the quality of the signal traveling over the heavy wire was excellent, but weather would frequently cause short circuits which locals attempted to fix with anything that could serve as an insulator (such as leather straps, corn cobs, cow horns, or glass bottles). There are newspaper reports of ranchers and farmers using fence phones in U.S. states such as California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Montana, South Dakota and also parts of Canada.
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