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CLASSIC: How Farmers Built A Barbed Wire Phone Network · Ridiculous History

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