[HN Gopher] Barbed wire fences were an early DIY telephone network
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Barbed wire fences were an early DIY telephone network
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-02-06 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Sears 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&vi...
| cube00 wrote:
| There's hope for rural areas under the iron grip of a single
| Internet provider.
| trothamel wrote:
| Starlink?
|
| Between Starlink and LTE/5G, that seems to be less and less
| each yes. (Which is good for everyone.)
| sigmaprimus wrote:
| Barbed 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.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| I 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Shred 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 wrote:
| Just snip it up. And you can get special gloves for when you're
| handling.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yuck, I know the feeling - just for me it was a piece of
| lightning rod conductor that snapped out of its coil, still
| have the scar in my face, but it has faded thankfully. Hope you
| did recover from your injury!
|
| > 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.
|
| Sell it at a scrap yard. They will sell it to a smelter and
| that's it.
|
| > My only idea is to get a forge or smelter and transform it
| into a less menacing product.
|
| If you go _that_ far in yak-shaving, there are some pretty
| amazing how-to videos on Youtube that detail how to build a
| proper forge - and actually make an axe or other medieval
| weapon out of ore.
| thaeli wrote:
| Scrap 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.
| zengid wrote:
| There'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]
| blueyes wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| alar44 wrote:
| ako wrote:
| Do you need cities to proof settlement? What about nomads?
| scsilver wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_people
|
| You don't need a city to consider it a settlement, they had
| dominion over the outlined land, treaties, and trade. I'd
| consider that civilation, settling, and land management.
| serf wrote:
| Cahokia comes to mind.
| earleybird wrote:
| https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/01/27/new-study-debunks-
| myth-...
| mplewis wrote:
| Do you think that civilization only exists within city
| limits?
| throw0101a wrote:
| 10BASE-T1L allows Ethernet over a single pair of cables at 1000m:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Sin...
| voakbasda wrote:
| This 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| Even more incredible, ADSL works over wet string:
|
| https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A large chunk of the UK wouldn't have broadband if it didn't.
| gruez wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| You need to consider reflections attenuation and imepdance
| [deleted]
| toast0 wrote:
| Anything commercially available?
| destitude wrote:
| Is 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.
| fit2rule wrote:
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I guess the other interesting thing is that these were likely
| single-wire earth return systems.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| The 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.
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(page generated 2022-02-06 23:01 UTC)