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Barbed wire fences were an early DIY telephone network
- dugmartin 5y agoMy dad worked for the phone company his entire life. He told me that early in his career, in the early 1960s, he did the engineering to convert a lot of barb wire circuits to central office circuits. He also said the used to have huge bonfires to get rid of the old wooden crank phones. This was all in Southern Illinois, not the Wild West.
- im3w1l 5y agoThat article references another one (that now 404s but is in web archive). Amazing story that mentions how people hooked up these systems to the normal one. https://web.archive.org/web/20110717074852/http://www.texashillcountry.com/Stories/RuralTelephoneSystems.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110717074852/http://www.texash...
- ncmncm 5y agoWhy does this keep popping up on the dash here? I have seen it at least three times in the last few months. It is an interesting historical factoid, but there are plenty of others now more worthy of my attention.
- caboteria 5y agoMy first job out of school (in the '80's) was working for a company that managed the infrastructure for state lotteries. We ran the Texas lottery and, yes, we did occasionally have point of sale terminals drop off the network when a rancher forgot to close a gate.
- Fnoord 5y ago> "People would read the newspaper over the telephone," says MacDougall. Copyright infringement. But nobody cared. That was the beauty of the Internet last century. The general public wasn't online (much), the impact of what happened on the Internet was limited. Even though 1on1 could be eavesdropped (like physical), nobody cares. Usually. And if they do, they will eavesdrop, that is still true nowadays (que NSO zero day reference), and probably justified (has to be within proportion of law).
- alamortsubite 5y agoThe National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has a fantastic collection of barbed wire strands- well over a thousand different styles. I can't remember if it goes very deep into the fences serving as telephone networks, but seeing the variety of types and their evolution into a wire that could be cheaply mass-produced is fascinating and impressive.
- throw0101a 5y ago10BASE-T1L allows Ethernet over a single pair of cables at 1000m: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Single-pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Sin...
- samwillis 5y agoEven more incredible, ADSL works over wet string: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html?m=1 https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...
- gruez 5y agoIs it really surprising that ADSL2, which was apparently designed to work "up to 5000 meters" of copper, can work over 2 meters of wet string? Wet salty string being 1/2500th as conductive as copper wire doesn't seem too far fetched.
- rubatuga 5y agoYou need to consider reflections attenuation and imepdance
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 5y agoA large chunk of the UK wouldn't have broadband if it didn't.
- voakbasda 5y agoThis is exactly what I have been looking to find for connecting a camera at my front gate to my house, which are over 1/4 mile away from each other.
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- fit2rule 5y agoI used the barbed wire fence of the horse-ranch I was on, out in the bush, as an antenna for a broken TV I'd found ditched on the side of the road a few days prior .. I got through the static and tuned into RAGE, Cabaret Voltaire Sensoria, and was baptised in electrons for life ..
- cube00 5y agoThere's hope for rural areas under the iron grip of a single Internet provider.
- trothamel 5y agoStarlink? Between Starlink and LTE/5G, that seems to be less and less each yes. (Which is good for everyone.)
- sigmaprimus 5y agoBarbed wire might be a great invention but my personal experiences with it are not so rosy. I was cleaning up my property and found some laying on he ground from where there once stood long rotten fence posts that had since decomposed completely. While cleaning it up by wrapping it around a piece of wood, I learned the hard way that safety glasses are essential when working with it...An end of a strand in an almost lifelike manner whipped up and slashed me across the the bridge of my nose and my right eye lid. That was but one experience, since that time I have had the pleasure of laying under my backhoe with bolt cutters to remove 100s of feet that ended up wrapped around the front axels and walking through puddles in my gum boots only to realize the dreaded stuff had struck again by putting invisible holes in the bottoms of them. I believe I have managed to collect the majority of the abandoned wire but now I face the dilemma of what to do with it. I don't want to take it to the land fill and make it someone else's problem but don't want to have it in my way either as it is very heavy and cumbersome to move. My only idea is to get a forge or smelter and transform it into a less menacing product.
- thaeli 5y agoScrap yards don't want to deal with a tangled mess of barb wire - some won't accept it at all, some pay an extremely low rate for it. But if you cut it into short pieces (3ft or so) and neatly bundle it, most scrap yards will happily take it at their regular scrap steel rate.
- jacquesm 5y agoShred it. That will allow you to get the regular price for rusty steel for it. You may be able to rent a shredder or you may have to pay someone who has one to shred it for you. In the past barbed wire was a problem for shredders but the latest models eat it up like so much candy.
- chrisseaton 5y agoJust snip it up. And you can get special gloves for when you're handling.
- yetanotherloser 5y agoI wonder if you can do an interesting Damascus with it like those guys who do the same with old chainsaw chains. In landfill it's a waste of embedded energy but not likely to be a hazard so I wouldn't worry too much, but clearly made something cool >> efficiently recycled >> just junked.
- Scoundreller 5y agoI guess the other interesting thing is that these were likely single-wire earth return systems.
- blueyes 5y agoWhat this highlights for me was the loneliness of the homestead-era West, and the many attempts by people to connect with each other across the empty acres. It is an under-appreciated fact in America, and generally obscured by the Marlboro cowboy LARPing among certain cultural factions, that those who settled the West itself tried very hard to congregate, communicate and help each other in the face of harsh conditions. The loners didn't make it; the cowboys themselves were usually the hired help. Settlements in the west tended to congregate more densely, when they could, than what you see in rural New England. I believe this is partially because much of the west is a desert or semi-arid desert, and communities formed near the scarce sources of water; whereas the northeast didn't face those constraints.
- yardie 5y agoThe west was already settled. The "settlers" weren't interested in befriending or communicating with the indigenous population. In fact they were down right hostile towards them.
- refurb 5y agoHow about the native Americans who settled the already settled West? Were they friendly? (Hint: no)
- yardie 5y agoArmed people show up and saying my land is now their land I probably wouldn't be friendly either. The point is the west wasn't unsettled. But US History books would have you believe otherwise.
- refurb 5y agoWhen one native American tribe uses weapons to take another's resources, they probably weren't friendly either.
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- zengid 5y agoThere's an nice anecdote from James Gleick's book _The_Information_ about Claude Shannon making a telegraph on a barbwire fence: > "A curious child in a country town in the 1920s might naturally form an interest in the sending of messages along wires, as Claud Shannon did in Gaylord, Michigan. He saw wires every day, fencing the pastures--double strands of steel, twisted and barbed, structed from post to post. He scrounged what parts he could and jerry-rigged his own barbed-wire telegraph, tapping messages to another boy a half mile away. He used the code devised by Samuel F.B. Mores. That suited him. He like the very idea of codes--not just secret codes, but codes in the more general sense, words or symbols standing in for other words or symbols. He was an inventive and playful spirit. The child stayed with the man. All his life, he played games and invented games. He was a gadgeteer. The grown-up Shannon juggled and devised theories about juggling. When researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Bell Laboratories had to leap aside to let a unicycle pass, that was Shannon. He had more than his share of playfulness, and as a child he had a large portion of loneness, too, which along with his tinkerer's ingenuity helped motivate his barbed-wire telegraph." [Page 168 from my uncorrected galleys copy of the book]
- destitude 5y agoIs there any more details somewhere on how this worked? I assume they required electricity but where did the electricity come from? Was it using same exact phone they had in cities at the time? Not even sure what connections were required for regular phones at that time either. Any info would be helpful for my curiosity.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y agoOne of the linked stories [1] talks a bit about the dry cell batteries the phones used, and even mentions they sometimes used old car batteries [1] https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html
- Johnythree 5y agoThe old style phones used a local battery to power the carbon microphone (usually a pair of No.6 dry cells), and a hand-cranked magneto to generate the ring current. It's only relatively recently that city phones used a "Central Battery".
- MarkusWandel 5y agoSears was the Amazon of the day. Order by mail, receive by rail shipment, completely bypass local retail infrastructure. In some case this meant unmarked crates to avoid trouble. Here's a link to a catalogue page for DIY telephone equipment from those days. At least the link works for me right now. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&view=1up&seq=849&q1=telephone https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&vi...
- ck2 5y agoThat whole catalog is incredible, like a time machine. I remember looking in awe at the Sears catalog every time one came by mail, then all the smaller specialty ones. I get similar feelings looking back at heathkit catalogs from 1950s, 1960s, then there are the Radio Shack catalogs when the TRS-80 first came out, the world seemed like it was going to be amazing... ( https://heathkitcatalogs.com https://heathkitcatalogs.com )
- pessimizer 5y agoThings that we have lost, part 3: The Small Parts catalog. https://web.archive.org/web/20160323004150/http://www.smallparts2.com/catalogs-files/Small%20Parts%20Inc%202003%20Catalog%2022.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160323004150/http://www.smallp...
- mgdlbp 5y agoHow about McMaster-Carr? Their catalogue, print and online, seems to have a very similar philosophy. Also: all but the most specialized items get same- or next-day shipping. https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoI have to say that I don't really miss the McMaster-Carr catalog. Back when calling them on the phone was the only way to order, getting a catalog out of them was like pulling teeth. Things are far better now with online ordering: they'll sell to anyone.
- anotherevan 5y agoThis reminds me of a story about someone running a LAN from their house to a shed via a barbed wire fence. Apparently they got a fairly good data rate except when it was raining or a cow was leaning against the fence.
- tssva 5y agoWonder if they were running ARCNET over it. ARCNET was well known for working over some rather challenging mediums.
- the_only_law 5y agoI remember reading a brief note about some people somewhere in Africa running and X.25 network over barbed wire, and it’s been something I’ve wanted to try since.