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A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- cf100clunk 9mo agoSome great previous HN discussions on barbed wire telephony: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22barbed%20wire%22%20telephone&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... There are also discussions about networking over barbed wire.
- biofox 9mo agoVery cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&view=1up&seq=843 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&vi... The thing I'm most amazed by is how "modern" the catalogue is, especially the clothing and phonograph sections.
- torstenvl 9mo agoI was really disappointed not to see any mention of Claude Shannon running barbed wire comms in rural Northern Michigan.
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- eschulz 9mo agoAs a native of Northern Illinois, I was pleased to see Joseph Glidden mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Glidden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Glidden Edit: after reading about Claude Shannon, I too think it would have been nice if he was mentioned.
- jtickle 9mo agoThis is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.
- infinitewars 9mo agoMaybe they used a Delco-Light Plant
- biofox 9mo agoThe batteries were either charged using a "telephone magneto", or were taken to a local town to be charged off of mains electricity: https://www.1900s.org.uk/1920s60s-windup-phones.htm https://www.1900s.org.uk/1920s60s-windup-phones.htm
- pyrale 9mo agoFrom what I understand, the crank was used to ring the exchange's bell, not to reload the phone battery.
- greenbit 9mo agoYes, in the old systems, you'd get about 90 volts AC down the line to ring the mechanical bell ringer. Once saw a guy nearly fall off a ladder, splicing phone lines with bare hands. He thought the relatively low voltage was safe enough, but then someone rang him in the middle of the job.
- brewtide 9mo agoI know 30+ years ago as I kid I learned this in my parents basement as I was rigging something up. It is more the surprise, as if one is ignorant to this fact it is not expected at all.
- idatum 9mo agoI couple years ago I read "A Mind at Play", Soni & Goodman, a biography on Claude Shannon. He grew up on a farm and the book mentions how he made extensive use of barbed wire fence telegraph (and if I recall telephone). Perhaps one of the early experiences Shannon had regarding information. The MIT Museum had a display (last year) of Shannon's "toys", including the famous mouse maze. I don't recall any mention of his early days using barbed wire telegraph though.
- JackAcid 9mo agoI’ve had that book for several years. This thread has finally motivated me to start it.
- westurner 9mo ago"The Bit Player" (2018) film, "The Information" (Gleick) book, "Who invented the transistor?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449618 : > Who invented the electric fence gate? > How does the electric fence gate lead to transistors? > [ Relay, Electric gate, Flip-flop (electronics) ] /? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
- aspenmayer 9mo ago> /? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits) Who is meant to be doing the finding, in this case?
- westurner 8mo agoThere's a prompt and methods. That prompt can be used with any LLM
- dmazin 9mo agoIf you can get your hands on it, I recommend Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by the same author. She covers barbed wire as well as many other ways to communicate. The book itself is gorgeous.
- Luc 9mo agoIt's on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/emerson-lori-other-networks-a-radical-technology-sourcebook-anthology-editions-2024/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/emerson-lori-other-networks-a-ra...
- cluckindan 9mo agoNeeds more modem.
- MagicMoonlight 9mo agoThat’s really cool. I wonder if you could run anything else on a fence network. Like some sort of primitive computer network.
- bombcar 9mo agoYou can run Ethernet over coat hangers, barbed wire should be fine (if slow).
- ale42 9mo agoIt has already been done... albeit on short distances. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263 (2017 IIRC). This said I wouldn't expect it to work miles away as an analog phone would.
- thenthenthen 9mo agoOr dsl over wet string!
- _whiteCaps_ 9mo agoYou could probably do AX.25 over barbed wire.
- fmlpp 9mo agoAX.25 is the protocol.
- ck2 9mo agoThis is only vaguely related but I've been dying to drop this link after recently learning about the "Carrington Event" in 1859 The most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history Likely from the largest coronal mass ejection in modern human history The natural EMP effect was so powerful, telegraph operators were able to completely disconnect all their batteries and still communicate for hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event#Telegraphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event#Telegraphs Imagine some future event even more powerful and our dependence on all those LEO sats...
- wumms 9mo ago> Imagine some future event even more powerful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyake_event
- zafka 9mo agoWhen I was a kid, I scavenged a hunk of cable "Ma Bell" had left behind. I spliced together a quarter mile pair of wires to connect the neighbors house to mine and hooked up a battery and microphone on one side, and a speaker on the other. No luck. Then we connected the "speaker side" to the input of my friends stereo, and it was possible to be heard. I was about 10 at that time ( ~1970) and was not very aware of voltage drop. The taps and recording system I put in our basement worked much better!
- MarkusWandel 9mo agoIf you look in vintage Sears catalogs - easily found online - I have a printed copy somewhere of the 1908 one and it's definitely in there - aftermarket phones had a bit of a "contraband" aspect to them, and were offered to be shipped in unmarked boxes. Not all local phone companies were "friendly" to people stringing up their own lines.
- aftbit 9mo ago>Anecdotally, fence phones were still being used throughout the 1970s and perhaps even later. C.F. Eckhardt describes calling his parents who lived in rural Texas and still used a fence phone; their number was simply 37, designated on the small local network by three long rings and one short ring. Is this perhaps an OCR or typography error? If the number were "31" that would make much more sense to encode as three long one short. A stylized 1 can look a bit like a 7 depending on how the characters are drawn.
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- pseudohadamard 9mo agoWe still run comms over steel wire today, only most of the time we don't know it, it's called CCS and makes for really cheap "copper" wire. For example a neighbour bought a roll of remarkably cheap Cat5 a few months back and, yeah, I don't think your ethernet cable should have a magnet able to stick to it.
- dwd 9mo agoAs an aside, Goyte incorporating the Winton Musical Fence into one of his songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_iuE_L2wys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_iuE_L2wys
- 31337Logic 9mo agoFascinating!
- DoneWithAllThat 9mo agoI talked with someone years ago who did networking deep in third world countries in the 90s and early 00’s. Hey said they would not-infrequently use wire fences for wiring up remote locations using X.25 because the protocol was highly tolerant of very noisy lines, and it was the only way to have any confidence the infrastructure wouldn’t just be ripped out the day after they left.