Barbed wire telephone lines connected the old frontier
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Jodi:
Rob, barbed wire had not been invented very long by the time the people in the frontier decided that, "Hey. We can use this for more than just keeping cattle in place." How did barbed wire become linked up with the telephone?
Rob:
Yeah, so you're right. It hadn't been invented very long. Both the telephone and barbed wire are inventions of the late 19th century. The telephone was invented in 1876. Most people say by Alexander Graham Bell. You can get an argument going on that subject, but definitely telephones appeared in the 1870s. But the Bell companies made the decision very early on that they would rent phones or lease phones rather than sell them. And that really they were selling a service, a telephone service, rather than just selling a device which you could come and use however you wanted. And what they were doing in making that decision is they were focusing on a specific class of users. The Bell companies assumed that the telephone was for businessmen in urban centers. They kept the price very high.
Rob:
They figured the way to make money off the telephone is to keep the price high, and wealthy businessmen are the only people who are really important enough to have the money that their communications have to travel in this fast way. So Bell for the first 15 years of the telephone, which were the years in which the Bell Company was protected by Alexander Graham Bell's patents, were still really spread only to business users in very large cities. The number of people actually using the telephone remained very small. The telephone was very expensive. It was a luxury item. But when the Bell patents were overturned or expired in the 1890s there was an explosion of independent telephone manufacturers and independent phone systems.
Rob:
There was a pent-up demand for the telephone that the Bell companies had not foreseen, which was in rural areas. And farmers and people in rural areas, they immediately saw the utility of having this way to talk to their friends, to talk from farm into town. So there was this great demand to set up their own telephone systems. But the Bell companies, they were very slow in capturing that market and so people just started building their own phone systems. Sometimes these were private companies, sort of medium-size private companies. But often these were just little cooperatives along the same lines as the cooperative farm organizations like The Grange in the late 19th century, cooperative grain elevators.
Rob:
Sometimes this was only five or six farms, or a dozen farm families would get together, buy telephones from one of these independent manufacturers. But then of course you need wires. The hardest part is you need a wire to run from each phone to every other phone. Sometimes they would string up their own wires. But sometimes, "Well, we've already got this wire running at least half the distance along the edge of my farm, and really all you need to carry a telephone signal is a metallic wire." So farmers who did have barbed wire fences attached their telephones directly to those barbed wire fences and ran electrical current through the fences. And it worked. You could talk that way.
Jodi:
That's really, really interesting. Now what kind of wire did they have to use to attach to the fence to have the signal go through?
Rob:
Oh, that's a good question. The exact material this was made out of I'm not sure. But barbed wire fences, they were conductive. What I will say is, it's not ... Doesn't exactly answer your question, but these systems immediately became known as barbed wire telephone systems because the image of the current running through the barbed wire is so wonderful. Just as it amuses us today, even then people were sort of struck by this image. A lot of the time barbed wire fences themselves were used.
Rob:
Sometimes it wasn't literally a barbed wire fence. Sometimes farmers would nail a copper wire along the top of a wooden fence, or it might be a combination of the two. The barbed wire fence might run for part of the distance and then they'd have to cross a road or a river or something. They'd have to string up a separate wire. Another name that these systems had was squirrel lines, named for squirrels running along the top of fences.
Jodi:
And we all know what happens to squirrels sometimes when they get into electrical components that they shouldn't.
Rob:
Well yeah, and these wires were not insulated without getting too deep into the technicalities. Of course, an electrical circuit requires electricity to go in two directions. So what the Bell Company was doing in the cities was running double wires. So a wire would run from me to you and then another wire would carry that circuit back. But you could cut your wire costs in half by simply grounding it into the earth and letting the earth carry the current back. That's what the farmers did. You get a lot more interference on the line, you get sort of weird sometimes crosstalk and ghostly sounds on the line. But again, this was a cheaper way of getting a system up and running.
Jodi:
So you have your system up and running, and you've got your phone running, and everything's connected to the fence or whatever. How did that work then? How did they know who a call was going to or if they were receiving one?
Rob:
Yeah. Great question. Another thing of course is that these farmer systems were almost invariably party lines. So there's no operator. Everybody is on the same line. Everybody, so I say there might be a dozen farmers on the line and everybody is connected to the same circuit. So what you would do is, every household would have a distinct ring. Mine might be two short rings and a long. Yours might be a long, a short, and then a long. You turn the crank on the side of your phone to generate the ring and everybody with a phone hears the ring.
Rob:
And I say, "Oh, that's Jodi's ring so I'm not going to bother answering it." Or maybe I say, "Oh, that's Jodi's ring. I'm going to pick up the phone and listen in on the conversation Jodi's having," because of course these lines were not private. Now, I doubt that any of your listeners actually used a barbed wire phone, but I'm sure that some of your older listeners do remember party lines because those were in use into I think the 1980s or even '90s.
Jodi:
Yeah, I'll bet there was a lot of eavesdropping, and gossip, and stuff like that. But you know these lines could also be used for other things like entertainment, or saying, "Hey. Get the doctor." I mean they really came in handy.
Rob:
Yeah, absolutely. We hear of this idea of eavesdropping on the line or everybody sharing one telephone line, and we might be inclined to think, "Oh, that's a bug of the system." But I think that, again, the innovation of the people setting these up was that it was also a feature. It was also a good point. So they could have these group conversations, and yeah, it became a broadcast medium as well as a communication medium. So people might read the news over the wires and anyone who wanted to listen in could listen in.
Rob:
People might give weather reports or crop prices. They might just tell stories. They might broadcast sermons on Sunday. Or they might play music. They might all even sing along. I can't imagine the sound quality would be too great. But nevertheless, there was us this kind of sociability that emerged from everyone being linked on the same line. And as you say, in emergencies what someone would do is just ring one long steady ring. That was kind of the equivalent of 911, and everybody would pick up the phone and see what's happening and how can I help?
Jodi:
Were there some shenanigans with these lines too? Sometimes they didn't always work as they were supposed to.
Rob:
Oh, I didn't know if you meant technical shenanigans or-
Jodi:
Well, yeah. No.
Rob:
... apart from personal shenanigans, but there was both.
Jodi:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about technical shenanigans first. What sorts of things could go wrong with these phone lines?
Rob:
Yeah. Well, if all you're doing is running electrical current through an unshielded wire, then many things can go wrong. Of course the lines could get damaged. They could get cut. Animals could knock them down. People could knock them down. Even a strong rain might ground the circuit and interfere with your transmission. As I say, if you had another electrical circuit crossing it, you could get crosstalk and end up hearing something else or even just weird ghostly sounds. The weather, ice and snow would often take down these lines. So these were not 100% reliable and there was a lot of work involved just in fixing up the lines. And how these mutual systems usually worked is that everybody was responsible for maintaining their own section of the wire.
Jodi:
Okay. And then of course the shenanigans, intentional damage to the wire.
Rob:
Intentional damage to the wire, intentional misuse of the phone. As I say, the telephone's invented in 1876 and I think the prank phone call is invented in 1877. It doesn't take long for people to start misusing technologies.
Jodi:
Yeah. This had to have been a really good way to keep depression and all those other feelings of loneliness of the frontier and the settlers out there, kind of help keep that stuff at bay.
Rob:
Yeah. There's a lot of talk, and this period, the late 19th century, early 20th century, is a time when the center of gravity and population is really shifting from rural areas to urban areas. And there's a lot of anxiety among rural people about keeping people on the farm and the isolation of the farm. So there was a great deal of talk about just that, the way that the telephone helped to break up the isolation of farm life, helped to create community, helped to connect people. And again, the party line works well in doing just that.
Jodi:
About how many miles could a party line stretch, one line on a dozen people? You think if people were so scattered and far apart in those days
Rob:
They could run for miles. So an average mutual system, one of these cooperative systems, might average about 10 phones per line and maybe one phone every mile or so. So it might stretch about 10 miles. The limiting factor is, well the sound quality is going to get worse the farther you go. Then the other limiting factor is the battery. If you imagine a really old telephone, those sort of big wooden boxes that hang on the wall, what was inside that big wooden box is a battery. And you needed a more powerful battery to make a longer call.
Rob:
But another point to be made about this is that these were not long-distance telephone calls, and these telephone lines could not make long-distance calls. That was another point of argument between Bell and the independent telephone companies is Bell would say, "Well, the problem with these independent lines is you can't make long-distance calls." But the farmers and the independent telephone people would say, "Well, our customers don't have any reason to call San Francisco. They don't have any reason to call New York. The only person they want to call is five miles down the road," and so that's what the system was designed for.
Jodi:
How long did this system last?
Rob:
The heyday of the farmer systems was definitely the first couple decades of the 20th century, the 1900s, the 1910s. By the first World War and into the 1920s Bell succeeded in either absorbing or forcing out of business a lot of the independent companies. I mean some survived into the '60s, '70s. There may be a few around today. The barbed wire systems, I don't think any of those would've been around much after, near the second World War. Then party lines, as I say, were still in use into the 1980s in some rural areas. But the heyday of what we're talking about is really the 1900s and 1910s.
Jodi:
Okay. Out of frustration comes innovation. That's for sure. Rob, I think that's all the questions that I have unless there's anything else you wanted to mention about this very creative way of communication.
Rob:
Yeah, I think I'd just say that it's a great example of people's innovation, and that the people who officially own a product don't always foresee all the things that people are going to come up with to do with it. And if you don't serve the market, the market's going to create itself.