Latest / Ridiculous History / How Farmers Built A Barbed Wire Phone Network

Transcript

How Farmers Built A Barbed Wire Phone Network · Ridiculous History

0:23
Speaker 1: Hey, Casey, could we could we start this episode off
0:27
Speaker 1: with an old school dialing a number kind of telephone thing.
0:49
Speaker 1: There we go, I'm Ben, Hello, I mean hello, it's me.
0:56
Speaker 1: I've been a man home along long. Oh yeah, it's no.
1:00
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I was. I thought the holding music was
1:02
Speaker 1: good enough that I was. I was going to sit
1:04
Speaker 1: there with everyone for a while. Ben't it like that.
1:08
Speaker 1: I was just doing a little uh telephone related music
1:11
Speaker 1: number from Todd Rundgren by way of Adele. And you're
1:16
Speaker 1: here to listen to that holding music as well. Thanks
1:20
Speaker 1: so much for dropping by, folks. This is ridiculous history. No,
1:25
Speaker 1: before we begin, I have to ask you something that
1:28
Speaker 1: I'm sure both you and our super producer Casey Pegram
1:32
Speaker 1: have heard numerous times in our meetings here. Have you
1:36
Speaker 1: ever been on hold at a conference call and there's
1:39
Speaker 1: this terrible song about being on hold on a telephone? Yeah,
1:46
Speaker 1: that's that's uber conference, I think is what you're talking about. Ben. Wait,
1:54
Speaker 1: and I don't wonder where am I friends? I'd know
1:56
Speaker 1: why I am a friend? Why did they go? And
2:00
Speaker 1: it's sort of sedate. It's cute the first time you
2:03
Speaker 1: hear it, but then it's it just it just kind
2:04
Speaker 1: of wears on you and grades on you. Yeah, it
2:06
Speaker 1: never ends. At some point, it indeterminably loops and you're
2:11
Speaker 1: still waiting. Yeah. And it's weird because listeners peep behind
2:14
Speaker 1: the curtain. When we're not podcasting, we're on conference calls,
2:17
Speaker 1: and typically on commerce calls where the people were waiting
2:20
Speaker 1: for never show up, So we just hear that song
2:22
Speaker 1: over and over and over again. It's like a more
2:24
Speaker 1: Internet trolley version of waiting for Good Do. Yeah. And
2:28
Speaker 1: you know that kind of figures into the story for
2:31
Speaker 1: today because there's a lot of themes in the story
2:33
Speaker 1: that are kind of pre Internet. He aren't They absolutely
2:36
Speaker 1: in in a in a very prescient way, I would argue,
2:40
Speaker 1: it turns out so that we don't bury the lead
2:42
Speaker 1: too much. Back in the day, before the days of
2:45
Speaker 1: snazzy cell phones, before the days of even those awkward,
2:50
Speaker 1: uh nineteen eighties Wall Street hot shot phones. You know
2:53
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. For everybody I'm miming awkwardly to
2:57
Speaker 1: know that this is the big antenna due to sort
3:00
Speaker 1: of a swoop of the arm. And I'm also thinking
3:02
Speaker 1: about the ones that came in a bag. Oh yeah, yeah,
3:05
Speaker 1: before the days of all that stuff. When the telephone
3:09
Speaker 1: was a new, fancy and vital invention, right, the people
3:15
Speaker 1: ran into problems. One of the big problems was infrastructure,
3:18
Speaker 1: especially in rural areas. In the early nineteen hundreds, there
3:22
Speaker 1: were so many amazing innovations. We got refrigerators, radios, electric
3:28
Speaker 1: washing machines and so on. But one of the more
3:33
Speaker 1: simplistic innovations of the let's say late eighteen hundreds that
3:38
Speaker 1: played a huge role in communication for a while was,
3:41
Speaker 1: oddly enough, barbed wire. That's right. It was incredibly effective
3:45
Speaker 1: and innovative in exactly the thing that it was meant
3:48
Speaker 1: to do, which was to keep things in or not
3:51
Speaker 1: let things out. Um And it was patented in eighteen
3:54
Speaker 1: seventy four by Joseph Glinton, that's right, and not long
3:59
Speaker 1: after at at all. The telephone was patented in eighteen
4:04
Speaker 1: seventy seven, and barbed wire played a big role in
4:08
Speaker 1: helping to spread the the use of the telephone to
4:13
Speaker 1: some of those rural places that did not have access
4:15
Speaker 1: to that infrastructure. Because ma Bell, as it was known,
4:18
Speaker 1: had to get the most bang for her buck, right,
4:20
Speaker 1: so she was going to install those lines only in
4:22
Speaker 1: the places where they could have the most customers that
4:26
Speaker 1: were the closest together right right, therefore cities, right, urban populations,
4:31
Speaker 1: and we see, you know, we see a similar thing
4:34
Speaker 1: happening with telecommunications construction in rural areas of the United
4:38
Speaker 1: States at least today. But once the patents, once the
4:44
Speaker 1: patents for the phone began to expire, and around three
4:48
Speaker 1: or so other companies were making phones. Willy Nilly Sears,
4:52
Speaker 1: Roebuck made a phone. I mean, they made almost everything
4:55
Speaker 1: back then, right, they were the costco of their time.
4:58
Speaker 1: But the point is it became much easier to purchase
5:03
Speaker 1: a telephone set. It did not, however, come with in
5:06
Speaker 1: the box a telephone line network, right, a network, yeah.
5:11
Speaker 1: And so what several enterprising farmers did is they said, well,
5:17
Speaker 1: if a wire is a wire, right, and if we
5:20
Speaker 1: can transmit sound a d yeah, right, how long is
5:24
Speaker 1: a piece of wire? Right? Uh? The question asked is
5:27
Speaker 1: are the wires in fencing that we have already built?
5:30
Speaker 1: Because barbed wire was tremendously popular and effective at preventing
5:34
Speaker 1: you know, bulls from getting toward heifer's when it wasn't
5:38
Speaker 1: breeding season, and keeping them away from China shops, and
5:41
Speaker 1: keeping them away from the important China shop industry at
5:44
Speaker 1: the time. What they said is, uh, let's let's give
5:49
Speaker 1: it a go. Let's see what happens if we connect
5:51
Speaker 1: the wire of a telephone to the wire on a
5:56
Speaker 1: barbed wire fence, and it turns out it worked really,
6:01
Speaker 1: really well. Typically, they take a smooth wire strung from
6:05
Speaker 1: a telephone in a house or a barn to a
6:07
Speaker 1: barbed wire fence. Then it would hook to the top
6:10
Speaker 1: strand of barbed wire. Most fences had you know, at
6:13
Speaker 1: least three, maybe four strands of barbed wire, so they
6:15
Speaker 1: would only use the top one, and the telephone signal
6:19
Speaker 1: would follow the wire to whatever other telephone was connected
6:23
Speaker 1: down the line. And typically that would be um for
6:26
Speaker 1: lack of better term, neighborhoods, because these were neighborhoods the
6:29
Speaker 1: way we think of them. These houses were miles and
6:31
Speaker 1: miles and miles apart from each other, these ranches and
6:34
Speaker 1: these farms. But this network of barbed wire fencing could
6:38
Speaker 1: potentially be connected, and you you know, you might have
6:41
Speaker 1: to do something like install a jumper to go over
6:44
Speaker 1: a road to connect to the next segment of fence
6:46
Speaker 1: that might belong to the other property right and they
6:50
Speaker 1: would do that. Once they figured how it worked and
6:51
Speaker 1: word got around that stuff started happening, didn't they. Yeah. Absolutely,
6:56
Speaker 1: And we have to emphasize how useful this was for people.
7:01
Speaker 1: They were They were essentially building cooperatives and this kind
7:04
Speaker 1: of approach was not something that was foreig into farming
7:08
Speaker 1: communities at the time. They had built cooperative irrigation projects
7:14
Speaker 1: and things of that nature. This was another example of
7:17
Speaker 1: people coming together and boom you go. You you're able
7:22
Speaker 1: to save a journey of miles and miles. Right, You
7:25
Speaker 1: can just call up one of your neighbors and say,
7:29
Speaker 1: you know, hey, keep an eye out for this lost lamb,
7:33
Speaker 1: or hey, are we still on for Sunday dinner, you know?
7:38
Speaker 1: Or God forbid you know, um grandmama um has her angina.
7:44
Speaker 1: You know, you call instead of having to send a
7:47
Speaker 1: horse or a runner, you just call the house down
7:50
Speaker 1: the line, and maybe there's a dock that can come
7:54
Speaker 1: a running, right. Yeah, And that's a really great point
7:57
Speaker 1: because we understand that even today can communication is a
8:02
Speaker 1: vital part of rural life, you know, especially if you're
8:06
Speaker 1: if you're isolated, you need to have an effective means
8:09
Speaker 1: of communicating from point A to point B. And I
8:12
Speaker 1: love how you point out what happens in an emergency,
8:15
Speaker 1: because this system, as ingenious as it is, it was imperfect,
8:21
Speaker 1: right at all. But just like that good old fashioned,
8:24
Speaker 1: down home ingenuity that got the system of running in
8:27
Speaker 1: the first place, they had to come up with interesting
8:29
Speaker 1: little fixes to kind of deal with the imperfect nature
8:33
Speaker 1: of this whole system, right Ben, Yeah, Yeah, absolutely no.
8:37
Speaker 1: In an article called before mob Bell Rural Telephone Systems
8:40
Speaker 1: in the West by an author named CF. Eckhart, they
8:43
Speaker 1: noted the following rain and large bulls with raging hormones
8:47
Speaker 1: were the nemeses of fence line telephone systems. Apparently, it
8:52
Speaker 1: would happen not too infrequently that a bull with a
8:56
Speaker 1: high threshold of pain and intense desire to quote make
9:00
Speaker 1: the acquaintance of heifer's in the next pasture could just
9:04
Speaker 1: ram through the line, ran through the fence such that
9:08
Speaker 1: it breaks the line, and then the ram through the heifers,
9:11
Speaker 1: ram through the heifers. Yeah, it's just rams on rams there,
9:15
Speaker 1: and they would have to have somebody come out and
9:18
Speaker 1: fix that line. And that was a little bit of
9:20
Speaker 1: an easier fix than rain. Yeah, it's true, you know,
9:24
Speaker 1: rain was a big problem because it would cause the
9:28
Speaker 1: signal to dissipate, and you know, if there were frost,
9:32
Speaker 1: they would have to wait until the frost thought entirely
9:34
Speaker 1: to even use the system. We did not mention though,
9:36
Speaker 1: that there would be maybe around twenty phones connected together
9:40
Speaker 1: on one of these systems, the network size of the network.
9:43
Speaker 1: But not only that, anytime someone made a call, every
9:45
Speaker 1: single phone would ring. That's the other problem. It's a
9:48
Speaker 1: cool party line. They had them, like even in the eighties.
9:51
Speaker 1: I kind of remember them. You'd have them in your
9:53
Speaker 1: house or in a neighborhood. It was I guess it
9:56
Speaker 1: was for fun. I can't think of what the functional
9:58
Speaker 1: reason was to do it later, but this was just
10:00
Speaker 1: an absolute byproduct of how this system was. Either you
10:04
Speaker 1: didn't dial anybody you know had a number, so they
10:06
Speaker 1: would come up with these um special rings for a family.
10:09
Speaker 1: And the phones that we're talking about were largely these
10:12
Speaker 1: crank generator phones. So if a family's ring code was
10:17
Speaker 1: dot dot dash or like you know, a long long short,
10:20
Speaker 1: you would do crank, crank, crank, you know right. This
10:23
Speaker 1: shows how even when the system was working perfectly as intended,
10:29
Speaker 1: it had some definitive drawbacks. In a very real sense,
10:34
Speaker 1: everybody knew what you and your neighbor were talking about,
10:36
Speaker 1: and it was considered, especially in these larger communities of
10:39
Speaker 1: maybe twenty phones or something, it was considered common courtesy
10:43
Speaker 1: not to pick up the phone and eavesdrop if you
10:46
Speaker 1: knew somebody was calling the Jorgensen's and not your house.
10:50
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, quote unquote, listening in became
10:54
Speaker 1: a very very popular activity. Yeah, it's true, and I
10:58
Speaker 1: did read somewhere. It was actually in a common section
11:00
Speaker 1: on a Gizmoto article about this called barbed wire fences
11:04
Speaker 1: were an early d I Y telephone network. Um, folks
11:08
Speaker 1: were talking about more the party line systems of you know,
11:12
Speaker 1: more recent years, but if anything, that would just be
11:15
Speaker 1: a kind of higher quality version of what we're talking
11:18
Speaker 1: about here. And apparently the more people that are on
11:20
Speaker 1: the line, the signal starts to diminish, kind of like
11:23
Speaker 1: making a copy of a copy of a copy, I guess,
11:25
Speaker 1: And you could kind of tell when someone picked up
11:28
Speaker 1: because the signal dropped a little bit, so kind of
11:30
Speaker 1: people would be like, get off the line, who's on
11:32
Speaker 1: the line. That kind of state. You hear that a
11:35
Speaker 1: lot this cooperation made it a little easier for them
11:43
Speaker 1: to detect where a break was in the line. Possibly, yeah, right,
11:47
Speaker 1: and that's how they can find the bull. Uh. I
11:49
Speaker 1: was going to say the bull breaks if we're gonna
11:51
Speaker 1: make something up. But rain was a little bit more
11:54
Speaker 1: perfidious because it gets soaked the fence post as well,
11:58
Speaker 1: and to combat that, they needed to have insulation, so
12:02
Speaker 1: you see, like porcelain tubes. Actually, the weird answer is
12:06
Speaker 1: that when especially in Texas, when huge thunderstorm came through,
12:12
Speaker 1: it would ground the entire system until things dried out.
12:15
Speaker 1: But they solved it by working with saloons, the discarded
12:20
Speaker 1: beer bottles, whiskey bottles and so on. Glass is a
12:23
Speaker 1: great electrical insulator, and so they would collect bottles from
12:26
Speaker 1: the saloons, break the necks off, whittle wooden pegs to
12:30
Speaker 1: fit into the broken bottlenecks, drill holes in the pegs,
12:33
Speaker 1: and these glass insulators got nailed defense posts, and then
12:37
Speaker 1: you could string the wire along the insulator so that
12:40
Speaker 1: you could reliably communicate, you know, but then you know,
12:47
Speaker 1: it's still not perfect, but it sounds pretty cool, right, Yeah.
12:49
Speaker 1: And there's more fun little tricks too. We're talking about emergencies.
12:52
Speaker 1: They'd have a particular ring for emergencies. They even started
12:57
Speaker 1: treating it almost like a pirate radio network in a
13:00
Speaker 1: way where, um, they would have if if you're maybe
13:03
Speaker 1: someone in your household played the banjo and you had
13:06
Speaker 1: a little string band or something like that, you would
13:09
Speaker 1: play into the phone and people, you know that listening
13:12
Speaker 1: in on that would be welcome, you know, and that
13:14
Speaker 1: would be almost like a community engagement kind of thing,
13:17
Speaker 1: you know, bringing coming together with your neighbors over these
13:20
Speaker 1: at times quite large distances between households. Yeah, and there
13:24
Speaker 1: are some heartwarming accounts of you know, the one guy,
13:28
Speaker 1: the first guy or first family in the neighborhood to
13:30
Speaker 1: get a radio turning into like the radio hour every
13:34
Speaker 1: nine pm. Here's the up to minute stories. Right. Also, wait,
13:38
Speaker 1: I forgot we should talk turkey. We should talk prices.
13:42
Speaker 1: Because this wasn't a thing that incorporated long distance phone
13:47
Speaker 1: call charges. It didn't have any weird hidden fees. You
13:50
Speaker 1: didn't really have to sign, uh, you know, a binding
13:53
Speaker 1: through your contract. It's like when I every now and
13:55
Speaker 1: then say, you know, I Ben, I think I'm gonna
13:56
Speaker 1: start a cell phone company. You do say that, and
13:59
Speaker 1: then you're like all on all my friends, the time
14:03
Speaker 1: for that has passed, but not during this time. This
14:05
Speaker 1: was literally like a from the ground up, no pun intended,
14:09
Speaker 1: maybe a little a little bit a little bit uh
14:11
Speaker 1: d i y telecommunications network. Yeah. By one estimate, service
14:17
Speaker 1: ran four a mere three to eighteen dollars a year,
14:20
Speaker 1: and that was way less than the regional phone companies charged.
14:23
Speaker 1: And the labor for maintaining these networks was supplied by
14:28
Speaker 1: volunteers because often if there's barbed wire already, they would
14:32
Speaker 1: be repairing it in the course of regular farm Who
14:34
Speaker 1: are you paying though? I don't understand that. Um. I
14:37
Speaker 1: thought it was just kind of a cooperative like a
14:38
Speaker 1: collective kind of thing, right, So this would vary from
14:42
Speaker 1: cooperative to co operative organization organization. Let's look at one
14:46
Speaker 1: example in the Montana East Line Telephone Association. It sounds
14:52
Speaker 1: pretty classy, right, who does There are eight members, but
14:58
Speaker 1: they had a leader who identified himself as H. B.
15:03
Speaker 1: S in farming publications, and he said that he would
15:06
Speaker 1: be able to get them connected for a fee of
15:09
Speaker 1: twenty five dollars each. So so that three to ten
15:12
Speaker 1: or whatever, that's a one time fee. That's cool. See
15:16
Speaker 1: ben I was picturing this all wrong. I was picturing
15:18
Speaker 1: that it was a straight up cooperation between those families
15:22
Speaker 1: that lived in closest proximity. But I realized now that
15:24
Speaker 1: this began to have a much wider reach, didn't that? Yeah, yeah,
15:28
Speaker 1: And you're absolutely right now, maybe it wasn't first, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
15:32
Speaker 1: And at first was also probably a calculation of necessity
15:35
Speaker 1: more than novelty. Right. So, in the case of Montana
15:38
Speaker 1: East Line Telephone Association, h b S sells the following
15:43
Speaker 1: package for about twenty five bucks each, a telephone set
15:46
Speaker 1: with two dry batteries and a shore ring condenser, a magneto,
15:51
Speaker 1: a lightning arrest or, a ground knob, knobs and tubes,
15:54
Speaker 1: plus ten feet of interior wire and around fifty feet
15:58
Speaker 1: of outside drop wire that connect to the nearest poll.
16:02
Speaker 1: And then HBS says, you know, beyond that, like if
16:05
Speaker 1: you're more than uh sixty feet away from where that
16:10
Speaker 1: that nearest polar wire is, beyond that, you can use
16:13
Speaker 1: any kind of wire you have. And people did have
16:15
Speaker 1: wire laying around, you know, probably barbed wire. Yeah. In fact,
16:18
Speaker 1: and this it started to catch on that this was
16:22
Speaker 1: a valuable commodity in these unwired um traditionally areas and
16:28
Speaker 1: in Arizona in Hidalgo County. Um, a new railroad that
16:34
Speaker 1: had been installed. Um, some trains killed, uh, somebody's bull,
16:39
Speaker 1: and the railroad company as payment, allowed this local network
16:45
Speaker 1: to use some of their railroad signposts as jumpers for
16:50
Speaker 1: the phone network. Oh cool. You know what, that's one
16:53
Speaker 1: of the few times that we have seen a railroad
16:56
Speaker 1: company portraying a positive light. That's a really good point
16:59
Speaker 1: and think of at that. And you know, as it
17:01
Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger with these associations like you're talking about,
17:04
Speaker 1: things like switchboards even came into the picture, didn't they. Yeah.
17:08
Speaker 1: They would be typically in a store in the local
17:11
Speaker 1: town area or often in somebody's kitchen, and then they
17:15
Speaker 1: would have switchboard operators who had limited hours, right, so
17:19
Speaker 1: you you would, uh, you would ring into the switchboard
17:23
Speaker 1: and then asked to be connected somewhere. There's another thing here.
17:27
Speaker 1: We know you mentioned earlier how these took off and
17:31
Speaker 1: how they grew quite popular at the time. By nineteen
17:35
Speaker 1: o two, there were more than six thousand small independent
17:38
Speaker 1: phone companies that were actually farmers mutuals like you know,
17:43
Speaker 1: the farming collective or cooperative phone network and you know
17:47
Speaker 1: this not only was it functional, and we have that
17:50
Speaker 1: community aspect to it. Right. Um. In an article from
17:54
Speaker 1: Atlas Obscura, there's a really great quote from a woman
17:57
Speaker 1: named Emma Marble who was a young homestead or we
18:01
Speaker 1: haven't really even talked about the idea of homesteading. How
18:05
Speaker 1: this was a thing where people were given land grants
18:08
Speaker 1: by the government in order to come out and settle
18:11
Speaker 1: some of these um more widely parts of the country
18:15
Speaker 1: in the Midwest and such, right, um, m A Marble
18:19
Speaker 1: in this article who's a young homesteader in in the
18:23
Speaker 1: in Arizona, um said that the lines kept loneliness at bay. Right.
18:29
Speaker 1: She said. The theory was that we would answer only
18:31
Speaker 1: when our own ring sounded, but whenever the bell rang,
18:34
Speaker 1: every woman on the line rushed to a receiver. Um.
18:38
Speaker 1: And speaking of the homesteading thing, there was another use
18:43
Speaker 1: where there would be inspections from time to time. Property
18:47
Speaker 1: inspectors were just people like representatives from the government that
18:50
Speaker 1: would come and visit these homesteads to make sure they
18:54
Speaker 1: were operating according to the law that granted them these
18:58
Speaker 1: pieces of land. And whenever they would someone down the
19:02
Speaker 1: line on that single dirt road leading between these these
19:05
Speaker 1: properties would see the inspector coming, those party lines would
19:09
Speaker 1: light up and everyone would know so they could get
19:11
Speaker 1: to work. Right, Yeah, that's that's cool. That's that's an
19:14
Speaker 1: awesome fact there. And and also just to just to add,
19:19
Speaker 1: we said limited hours about the switchboards, but I feel
19:22
Speaker 1: like we need to be clear this. This will be
19:24
Speaker 1: a good example of how kind of ad hawc and
19:26
Speaker 1: casual this was. The switchboard usually shut down around nine pm,
19:32
Speaker 1: so it worked from like maybe five thirty in the
19:33
Speaker 1: morning to nine pm. It was always shut down around
19:36
Speaker 1: two or three pm on Sunday so families could go
19:39
Speaker 1: to church, and it was also shut down on Saturday
19:42
Speaker 1: night if there were a dance in town. So you know, nobody,
19:47
Speaker 1: nobody had this as a salary job in these situations,
19:52
Speaker 1: and it was something that happened for the benefit of
19:54
Speaker 1: the community. Like when the party line blows up and
19:57
Speaker 1: it's time to it's time to at least look busy, right. Also,
20:02
Speaker 1: I have to say the use of the phrase party line,
20:06
Speaker 1: it still always reminds me of those commercials from the
20:08
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties where they're like call and chat with interesting
20:12
Speaker 1: people like numbers. So I could never when I was
20:16
Speaker 1: a kid, I could never tell if these were, you know,
20:18
Speaker 1: nine numbers of a romantic or sexual nature, or if
20:21
Speaker 1: there were really people who were just calling to be like, Hey,
20:24
Speaker 1: what's the names Derek? I just got the town. I
20:27
Speaker 1: want to talk to Derek. It seems awesome. All right, Well,
20:29
Speaker 1: since we've gotten to the modern party lines, let's talk
20:32
Speaker 1: about a little interesting tidbit that I saw about a
20:35
Speaker 1: modern use of this. You had talked about how the
20:38
Speaker 1: parallel between this time with having a hard time getting
20:43
Speaker 1: infrastructure in place in more rural areas comparing with that
20:46
Speaker 1: we're experiencing now with um other countries that are very
20:50
Speaker 1: hard to get to where there's a lot of poverty,
20:53
Speaker 1: and even somewhat you know, you're seeing issues with getting
20:56
Speaker 1: high speed internet in more world parts of the United States.
20:59
Speaker 1: So I was reading this article on gizmoto that I
21:01
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, and in the comments I found some fantastic
21:04
Speaker 1: I can't confirm this. I just want to read this
21:06
Speaker 1: to you and see what you think. UM user Chelanso
21:10
Speaker 1: says I attended a Cisco networking class where the instructor
21:12
Speaker 1: talked about this sort of thing he'd been deploying network
21:16
Speaker 1: equipment throughout Africa, and in some places there was no
21:19
Speaker 1: way to keep copper wires from being stolen, so in
21:22
Speaker 1: at least one installation they ran X point to five
21:26
Speaker 1: over barbed wire. Next point to five is a standard
21:29
Speaker 1: like a packet, UH, A wide area network, you know,
21:33
Speaker 1: like a very rudimentary Internet. Basically, that's amazing and I
21:37
Speaker 1: can't imagine a better testament to the brilliance of this
21:41
Speaker 1: sort of application. The wires a wire, there's a wire
21:44
Speaker 1: a wire. I hope this is deployed in more areas
21:46
Speaker 1: of the world. Uh. In the case of the US
21:55
Speaker 1: barbed wire telephone system, we know that it persisted much
22:00
Speaker 1: much longer than you might typically imagine, like into the seventies,
22:05
Speaker 1: especially some places in like Texas. I want to say, yes, yes,
22:08
Speaker 1: you're spot on, So there's uh. Eckhart in this article
22:12
Speaker 1: has a pretty pretty chuckle worthy description of his difficulty
22:18
Speaker 1: calling his parents, who still used a barbed wire system
22:22
Speaker 1: into the seventies. So this is definitely rural Texas. He
22:26
Speaker 1: said his parents lived in a place called Liberty Hill,
22:29
Speaker 1: north and west of Austin and outside the system, their
22:33
Speaker 1: own cooperative system. Their phone number was get this thirty seven,
22:38
Speaker 1: just that that has been there with the thirty seven
22:40
Speaker 1: couple to get the phone. I guess so, yeah, you're
22:43
Speaker 1: probably right actually, and uh. Inside their barbed wire system,
22:48
Speaker 1: their phone number was three longs and a short And
22:53
Speaker 1: when this guy was calling his parents, he would have
22:56
Speaker 1: to ring an operator in Dallas and tell her that
22:59
Speaker 1: he is calling Liberty Hill, Texas. She would say, where
23:02
Speaker 1: is it. He would say, it's in Williamson County. It's
23:05
Speaker 1: you know here in relation to Austin. She would say,
23:08
Speaker 1: that's area CO five one two. You can dial the
23:10
Speaker 1: number correct, And you would have to say, no, believe me,
23:13
Speaker 1: I can't. I do this all the time. And she
23:15
Speaker 1: would say what's number and he'd say thirty seven and
23:18
Speaker 1: she would say, sir, that's not a telephone number. So
23:21
Speaker 1: he would have to tell her to call somebody and
23:23
Speaker 1: then they would dial in. And this the strange thing
23:27
Speaker 1: is to me though, that these systems were able to
23:30
Speaker 1: work with the modern nineties seventies era telephone system. It's
23:34
Speaker 1: very cool and thus ends the story for now. At
23:37
Speaker 1: least of the time, farmers used barbed wire to you know,
23:42
Speaker 1: start a party line party all the time on the
23:46
Speaker 1: rural party line are we gonna do some rural party
23:49
Speaker 1: line voices. It's actually kind of tough for me to
23:51
Speaker 1: say rural j rural juror. He did a good job,
23:56
Speaker 1: but it sounded very unnatural. Ben, It's hard to say,
23:58
Speaker 1: like in the conversation rural Yes, our friends Scott, Benjamin
24:03
Speaker 1: is haunted by that phrase. By the way, and speaking
24:08
Speaker 1: of communication, we can't think of a better way to
24:11
Speaker 1: close out this episode than with a little listener mail.
24:15
Speaker 1: What are you saying, No, Ben, how about you go first? Alright?
24:21
Speaker 1: Sure thing, So our first letter arrives from Chris J.
24:26
Speaker 1: And Chris J says, Hey, guys, I just got done
24:29
Speaker 1: listening to your Wild West episode, and I thought it
24:31
Speaker 1: was great. I work at an archive in Wyoming, and
24:34
Speaker 1: we hold all sorts of collections related to the Wild West,
24:38
Speaker 1: like some papers of Buffalo Bill Cody or Alfred Jacob Miller,
24:41
Speaker 1: who painted some of the first images of the West.
24:44
Speaker 1: Myth and West, says Chris, go hand in hand. It
24:47
Speaker 1: is so pervasive that the Wyoming state government officially, and
24:51
Speaker 1: to some of us, grown worthily, adopted the codes of
24:54
Speaker 1: the West, which is essentially the idea of how to
24:57
Speaker 1: live like a cowboy. The mythologized for, and at least
25:00
Speaker 1: these myths are everywhere out here, mainly because it's become
25:03
Speaker 1: a source of tourism and is what people like to
25:05
Speaker 1: see when they travel in this area. Even though we're
25:08
Speaker 1: not all cowboys and we don't all ride horses. For
25:11
Speaker 1: better or worse, this myth is here to stay, despite
25:14
Speaker 1: exhaustive efforts by many historians and archivists to dispel it.
25:19
Speaker 1: One topic, Chris says that I thought I might suggest,
25:22
Speaker 1: along the same lines as the wild West, that is
25:25
Speaker 1: actually wild West is something called the Johnson County War.
25:29
Speaker 1: I've never heard of this in all of you, I
25:31
Speaker 1: have not. Essentially, in the late eighteen hundreds, a group
25:34
Speaker 1: of cattle barons who are also in the government, we're
25:36
Speaker 1: trying to take back land they perceived to be there's,
25:39
Speaker 1: even though it clearly belonged to settlers and small ranchers.
25:42
Speaker 1: Through a series of events including lynchings, cattle wrestling, corruption,
25:46
Speaker 1: and outlaws, a war broke out between the townspeople of
25:49
Speaker 1: Buffalo the surrounding area and the cattle barons. And they're
25:52
Speaker 1: hired guns, culminating in a siege and Butcher Cassie and
25:56
Speaker 1: the Sundance kids style shootout at a ranch house. I
25:59
Speaker 1: thought you guys might be interested. Keep up the good
26:01
Speaker 1: work and keep me ridiculous. You know that makes me
26:04
Speaker 1: think of just bringing back this mythologizing of the wild
26:07
Speaker 1: West that's seen in the World Tennant Bombs, where Owen
26:10
Speaker 1: Wilson's character is doing a reading from his book. His
26:12
Speaker 1: character you like hash I had to look at because
26:14
Speaker 1: this I wanted to want to read it for the
26:16
Speaker 1: crickets and the rust beetles scuttled among the nettles of
26:19
Speaker 1: the sage thicket. Vaminos, amigos. He whispered and threw the
26:23
Speaker 1: busted leather flint crawl over the loose weave of the saddlecock,
26:27
Speaker 1: and they wrote on in the friscalating dusk light. Sounds
26:32
Speaker 1: almost like a like a dig against Cormack. Yeah, I
26:36
Speaker 1: love it so much, man. But thank you very much
26:39
Speaker 1: Chris J. For the lovely email. Um and I've got
26:42
Speaker 1: one more yeah, yeah, yeah, well you know what, which
26:45
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stick with his wild West theme. We've got
26:47
Speaker 1: one here from Dennis Oh, and he says, hey, troops,
26:50
Speaker 1: just a quick couple of thoughts. I love the show overall.
26:53
Speaker 1: By the way, while the Wild West wasn't wild by
26:55
Speaker 1: any stretch of Hollywood. That doesn't mean that there weren't
26:58
Speaker 1: firearms back then. Then he gives us a link to
27:00
Speaker 1: an Economist article. He says, the Economist article arguing against
27:03
Speaker 1: America's love affair with the gun actually shows that gun
27:06
Speaker 1: ownership in the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially
27:08
Speaker 1: on the frontier, was incredibly common. People had guns, sure,
27:12
Speaker 1: of course, they just like today, rarely used them to
27:15
Speaker 1: kill a stranger because he liked a different brand of
27:19
Speaker 1: rock gut than they did exactly. But my real reason
27:22
Speaker 1: for emailing you is that you should totally do a
27:24
Speaker 1: credit mobi a r H podcast. You reference thousand dollar
27:28
Speaker 1: toilets and the like. Credit mobier may have invented that
27:31
Speaker 1: scam in the modern era. And that is the thing
27:33
Speaker 1: we talked about ben with crooked contractors and the kind
27:37
Speaker 1: of things you see in the Sopranos, with you know,
27:40
Speaker 1: laundering money by overcharging for relatively typically inexpensive things. He
27:47
Speaker 1: goes on to say, what you may not know is
27:48
Speaker 1: one of the chief congressional architects of the bribery scheme
27:52
Speaker 1: was Oaks. Aims Oaks. Now there's a name you don't
27:55
Speaker 1: hear anymore, and it's a good one. I like that.
27:57
Speaker 1: I think I might name my second born Oaks Oaks
27:59
Speaker 1: and his brother Oliver Oaks and Oliver. It sounds like
28:01
Speaker 1: a comedy duo, thinking acoustic coffee shop. Oh that's very good,
28:07
Speaker 1: like almost lately, you know, like a Simon and garfuncle
28:09
Speaker 1: from Oakes and Oliver. They didn't make it Simon and
28:12
Speaker 1: garf Uncle Overshadow. They're like Fulkner and Falcon, very much
28:15
Speaker 1: like that. So Oakes and Oliver um owned the Aims
28:19
Speaker 1: Shovel Shop in Easton, Massachusetts. His roots are in Easton,
28:22
Speaker 1: says Dennis. The Aims shovel Shop invented the pointed tip,
28:27
Speaker 1: curved blade shovel. Really, uh, and it was that shovel
28:32
Speaker 1: that built the railroad and various hand dug subways and
28:35
Speaker 1: also mine gold in California. So this shovel and these uh,
28:39
Speaker 1: these brothers Aims, they figured into a lot of the
28:42
Speaker 1: episodes we've done of late and don't they. Yeah. Absolutely,
28:44
Speaker 1: we have been on a bit of a Wild West
28:47
Speaker 1: Frontier kick. Is there is there more to the story?
28:49
Speaker 1: It really is. This this letter just kind of keeps
28:51
Speaker 1: keeps giving. So he goes on to say, you had
28:53
Speaker 1: Congressman Aims involved in the bribing scandal which overpaid for
28:56
Speaker 1: railroad supplies such as wait for it, the very he
29:00
Speaker 1: shovels he was selling. Further twist, the reason he did
29:04
Speaker 1: all of this wasn't to pat his own pocket or
29:07
Speaker 1: to scam the county. He was asked to take this
29:10
Speaker 1: over and complete the railroad at any cost by wait
29:14
Speaker 1: for it, Abraham Lincoln. Dunt dunt dune. No, it was
29:19
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln, not a question market, Abraham Lincoln. Abraham honest abe,
29:23
Speaker 1: He says, wow, I put the new spin on hold
29:27
Speaker 1: honest ab anybody who puts honest in their name and
29:31
Speaker 1: is clearly a deceptic coloring. Well, it's sort of like
29:33
Speaker 1: when you're like a gangster in your name is tiny,
29:35
Speaker 1: it usually means you're a big bruiser, or like the
29:38
Speaker 1: old prison joke where you know the toughest guy in
29:41
Speaker 1: the in the facility has a name like Smurf or
29:45
Speaker 1: baby Cakes. Anyway, Dennis finishes by saying the credit movie
29:49
Speaker 1: a story is fascinating. Aims was never really vilified for
29:52
Speaker 1: It's still a hometown hero and he got the railroad built. Uh,
29:56
Speaker 1: there is a monument to him and his brother out
29:58
Speaker 1: near Layer me You, Wyoming. Of course, several years after
30:02
Speaker 1: it was built, they moved the railroad and has sat
30:05
Speaker 1: alone for the last hundred and thirty years or so.
30:07
Speaker 1: That's it. Enjoy, have a great weekend, Asta, bombasta and
30:10
Speaker 1: all that. Dennis. Oh, thank you so much for writing
30:14
Speaker 1: to us, Dennis, and you as well, Chris. We immensely
30:18
Speaker 1: appreciate it. And this concludes our list mail but not
30:22
Speaker 1: our show. If you would like to learn more about
30:25
Speaker 1: barbed Wire, specifically, check out an episode of Stuff of
30:30
Speaker 1: Genius about barbed Wire's inventor little Easter Egg for you.
30:34
Speaker 1: It's voiced by our own long time best friend, Matt Frederick.
30:40
Speaker 1: Tell them, you know what, Tell them that we set
30:42
Speaker 1: you just yelled at at the at the laptop screen.
30:46
Speaker 1: He'll he'll hear you in his heart. But for now
30:48
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to ride off into our own friscalating
30:51
Speaker 1: dusk light. But in the meantime, you can write to
30:53
Speaker 1: us at Ridiculous how Stuff Works dot com. You can
30:56
Speaker 1: hit us up on social media where we are Ridiculous
30:59
Speaker 1: History on the Graham Facebook. Um. The other stuff that
31:03
Speaker 1: the Den's friends start is popping off Man. Let me
31:05
Speaker 1: tell you, Yeah, it's then your geo cities. That's what
31:08
Speaker 1: I hear. Um. And of course we'd like to thank
31:10
Speaker 1: our super producer, Casey Pegraham for putting up with us
31:13
Speaker 1: uh to the bitter end, our long suffering producer, as
31:17
Speaker 1: well as our regular contributor Laurie L. Dove, who wrote
31:21
Speaker 1: Ridiculous history Ranchers hacked barbed wire fences to create phone lines.
31:25
Speaker 1: And our composer, I like that we can say we'm
31:28
Speaker 1: our composer, Alex Williams be incomparable. And most importantly, you
31:34
Speaker 1: friends and neighbors, fellow farm cooperative fans, thanks for giving
31:39
Speaker 1: us a listen