Before phone lines gave barbed wire the boot (Image: Kevin Taylor/Alamy)
Personalised ringtones, chat rooms and online music – 19th-century ranchers pioneered social networking
LONG before Facebook or Twitter, there was a different kind of social network. Born in the Old West, it allowed communities to share updates and music, and to spread news and gossip. For a brief period at the start of the 20th century this network, owned by no one, was a model of democracy, openness and free speech – something that today’s internet activists can only dream about. Eventually, though, it faded, overwhelmed by commercially minded competitors. This is the story of a long-forgotten social revolution and the extremely unlikely technology it was built on: barbed wire.
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Getting connected could be a big problem in North America in the 1890s, especially in the vast open spaces of the rural west. You could buy a telephone set from a mail-order catalogue, but what about the phone line itself? The Bell Telephone system was putting all its effort into connecting urban areas and had little interest in stringing wires to remote communities.
It didn’t take long for a few enterprising ranchers to notice, though, that the west was already covered with wire – the barbed-wire fences that divided the range to keep each rancher’s stock separate. At its peak, more than a million kilometres of the stuff was being laid each year. Why not just let it do double duty as a phone line? After all, they figured, wire is wire, and the ranchers were eager to communicate with their cowpokes working at outlying camps.
The systems were not hard to set up: you just hooked some phones up to the fence. Although modern handsets draw their power down the phone wire from the central exchange, the phones at the time had their own battery which provided the DC current that carried the voice signal. Turning a crank on the phone spun a magneto that generated an AC current to drive the ringer. These self-contained phones needed nothing but a wire to be complete. “Any time you had something resembling metal to hook them to, you could set up a connection,” says Stu Lipoff, a communications engineer based near Boston.
The people’s net
Unlike conventional phone systems, the barbed-wire networks had no central exchange, no operators – and no monthly bill. Instead of ringing through the exchange to a single address, every call made every phone on the system ring. Soon each household had its own personal ringtone – two short rings then a long one, for example – but anyone could pick up. And they usually did. “When the phone rang, everybody on the line listened in,” says Delbert Trew, who runs the – which is dedicated to barbed wire – in McLean, Texas. “People didn’t see anyone for two, three weeks at a time. They were just so lonesome that any kind of contact was really something.”
The upshot was that rural phone systems – both the barbed-wire ones and those run by local cooperatives using conventional wire – developed a very different culture from city phones, says Rob MacDougall, a historian at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and author of The People’s Network, a new book on rural communications. Bell followed the money, targeting business users in the cities and charging based on usage. This led to a culture of brief, no-nonsense calls. In contrast, rural phone networks generally charged a flat fee or, for the barbed-wire networks, no fee at all.
Talk was free, and so people soon began to “hang out” on the phone, just as they do today in online social networks. “People would read the newspaper over the telephone,” says MacDougall. “They’d have musical nights where someone would play their banjo, someone else would sing along, and others would listen.” The shared line could even serve as a rudimentary broadcasting system. On many fence-phone networks, a single, very long ring would signal a “line call”, an announcement of interest to everyone on the system. This might be a weather report, weekly livestock prices, word that the train would arrive late, or news of an emergency such as a prairie fire.
“Talk was free, so people began to hang out on the phone, just as they do today in online networks”
By the start of the 20th century, barbed-wire telephone networks were popping up all over. In 1902, ranchers in Montana had grand plans to connect much of the state into a massive barbed-wire network stretching from the Missouri River north to the Canadian border. Similar systems came online in Texas, New Mexico, Canada, and even rural New York state, though most served just a few families. By 1907, independent phone systems claimed 3 million users in the US, about half a million more than the Bell system. The independents’ lead was clearest out west, where barbed wire was ubiquitous. In fact, rural users in the west and Midwest were more likely to have a phone than their Eastern urban counterparts, says MacDougall, and they made more calls per phone.
For such a cobbled-together system, the barbed-wire nets functioned surprisingly well. “These telephones generated a very strong electrical signal,” says Lipoff. Their carbon microphones put out several volts, thousands of times the size of signals from microphones in modern cellphones. And the heavy strands of wire carried that signal with less attenuation than modern twisted-pair phone cables. But listeners on the line weakened the signal, making nosy neighbours a technical problem as well as a social one.
The other challenge was rain, which caused short-circuits through the fence posts. Cowboys reduced the problem by supporting the wire on insulators, but store-bought ones were expensive. Leather straps, corn cobs and even cow horns were pressed into service. Best, though, was the neck from a glass bottle. “They had a good excuse to go buy a bottle of whisky,” Trew says, “because your line needed an insulator, see?”
Cheap and simple as they were, these networks gave ranchers exactly what they needed – a connection to neighbours in their immediate vicinity. “They were building, with wires, their already-existing social networks,” MacDougall says. That remains one of the functions of modern social networks, too: just think how many families keep track of one another on Facebook.
But today’s networks also allow users to reach out and make new connections, which the barbed-wire networks could not – and that lack of broader connectivity eventually doomed them. The formal phone system’s ubiquity, and especially its coveted “long lines” to distant cities, gradually won the day. By the 1920s, the barbed-wire telephones and the networks they helped spawn had receded into memory. Not until the rise of the internet would technology again support such rich social interactions along a strand of wire.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The wired Wild West”
