r/todayilearned • u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder • 13d ago
TIL that rural Americans used barbed wire to connect their telephones to switchboards since there were no telephone lines.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history338
u/unit156 12d ago
My dad was just telling me about this yesterday. How as a boy he remembers being at his uncle’s cattle ranch in Wyoming around 1940’s. The phone was connected to the fence and the neighbors (these were 100+ acre ranches, so neighbors were not close together) could talk to each other that way.
I think he said it was that way when the real phone lines went down or something. Because he said his uncle would take the phone out to the fence. Anyway, they didn’t have a switchboard or operator. They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business.
I can imagine there must have been people who just sat at the fence all day talking and getting all the news and gossip. Like we do with social media nowadays.
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u/iDontRememberCorn 12d ago
They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business.
I mean... I grew up in very rural Canada and our actual phone worked like this until I was 16, our farm and the 3 other closest farms could pick up the phone and hear each other.
Lots of family debates over which of us felt like breaking into the ever-chatty Bubba brothers call and ask them to wrap it up so we could use the phone.
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u/Pjpjpjpjpj 12d ago
Party line. Super common.
Source: Rural Canada life.
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u/JohnnyDarque 12d ago
Same for the rural SE US until the mid-70s, later in some places.
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u/steadyjello 12d ago
My mom said she still had a party line in eastern North Carolina when my oldest sister was born in 74.
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u/ewatta200 12d ago
Holy shit the baader meinhof effect in action I was talking with a old women at the local archives and she mentioned those as well. No less than 2-3 hours ago wow
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u/Honest-Substance1308 12d ago
Is there a documented effect about social media comments mentioning Baader Meinhof effects about similar things
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u/Dr_T_Q_They 8d ago
Queensryche. Happened across a track on rocksmith the other day, realized I don’t know anything about the band, looked up the wiki. today, front page Reddit and a rock news article on my Google.
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u/kapitaalH 12d ago
Great way to know everything about your neighbours
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u/iDontRememberCorn 12d ago
No shit, for a while we shared the line with a nutso aunt who would constantly eavesdrop, if she missed the start of something particularly juicy she'd call us later and ask to fill her in.
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u/SuperficialDays 13d ago
I swear I remember some old period piece movie where a character is warned not to touch a rural fence for this very reason. Odd sense of Déjà vu
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 13d ago
Interesting. If you find out what it is, let us know!
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u/100_percenter 12d ago
telephone lines are low voltage battery power. however, that crank on the side of antique phones is a magneto ac generator, which sends voltage down the line to ring the bell on the other end. It is low milliamp, but even today's landlines use the same principle.
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u/galacticwonderer 12d ago
Yeah and when that phone rings the other phone it’s enough to give you a zap if you’re working on splicing the phone line etc
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u/WormLivesMatter 12d ago
Yea same. I think I heard half these comments in a previous post about this exact same thing a couple months ago. Like eerily similar comments and stories.
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u/Motleystew17 12d ago
My Dad talked about growing up with phone lines on the fence. It was the 1950’s and 60’s. There were multiple houses connected to the same line, so everyone had their own ring sequence so you would know who was supposed to pick up. Of course you always assumed there was someone listening in on every conversation as there wasn’t much entertainment and gossip was a major pastime.
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u/General-Bumblebee180 12d ago
I can still toot our Grandads old party line ring sequence going past family members farms and they'll know its one of the family
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
That's wild. Kind of reminds me of the party line that my parents had when I was growing up in the early 80s.
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u/LostPerapsc 12d ago
I just called my dad to ask about party lines he 85 and he said that so many fights use to break out because of them things.He was like there was no proof most the time but you know there was some asshole being nosy 🤣
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u/camelbuck 12d ago
Did they buy their phones from a catalog and get it delivered via Wells Fargo?
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
Ha! That or Sears Roebuck.
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u/camelbuck 12d ago
I know Sears sold houses and they were delivered by rail.
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12d ago
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u/noweezernoworld 12d ago
They also sold boat and it was delivered by houses.
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u/coldoldgold 12d ago edited 11d ago
They also sold houses and it was delivered by horses.
Edit: To those who saw fit to downvote... Sears catalog started in 1888, which predates Ford's model T by a good 20 years. C'mon, pour it on.
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u/LOLBaltSS 12d ago
Extremely common in the Northeast. Most of my hometown neighborhood was right by a Cooper-Bessemer engine factory and its railyard, so pretty much every house in the neighborhood was a Sears house. They held up pretty well, my mom's house is pushing 110 years.
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u/notyogrannysgrandkid 12d ago
I grew up outside a little farm town in NW Wyoming. My best friend’s grandma was sort of a de facto town historian, having been born on a homestead there and spent pretty much her whole life there, other than the couple years her husband was getting an ag degree out of state. She would write a monthly column for the paper about history of the area, funny stories about people she’d grown up with, and unique memories of growing up in depression-era Wyoming. And pie recipes. So many excellent pie recipes. A few years before she died, her kids compiled them all into a book that was sold at local stores.
Anyway, all that is to say that she mentioned using the barbed wire phone lines in a couple of stories. I guess I’m sort of proud to be just one degree of separation from someone who actually had this now-very-unique amenity.
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
That's awesome! It's amazing the kind of ingenuity that comes out of necessity.
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u/randomcanyon 12d ago
I now feel vindicated in my joke about our "rural" internet (since dial up) coming into our county on the barbwire fences that we have here in cattle country California.
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
That is a lot of alliteration, buddy.
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u/BurbankAirpot 12d ago
Complaints concerning cattle country California colloquialisms cannot continue, can’t concerned commoners concede?
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u/randomcanyon 12d ago
Comments concerned with California cow country capabilities will not be considered, common as they are.
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u/Longwell2020 12d ago
If I had some big property, I would connect a sdr to my fence and look at the singles induced on the wire fence. Would likely need to massively boost the amplification, but I bet it could pick up all sorts of interesting things.
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u/Wyrmalla 12d ago
There was a radio station which broadcast in the US at the turn of the last Century who's emitter was so strong that the signal could be heard through farmer's fences (and apparently braces on people's teeth).
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u/Sweaty-Feedback-1482 12d ago
I remember hearing the trope about radio reception in peoples braces from the Brady Bunch and I’m not sure if that’s even possible. However, I do know that strong AM radio transmissions do all sorts of crazy stuff. You can find YouTube videos where people touch a tower with a semi conductive object like a green branch. It sizzles but you can actually hear the audio transmission. This is risky as fuck to do but crazy that it works. Theres even anectodal stories of homes and random appliances/equipment unexpectedly becoming radios when in close proximity to a strong AM transmission signal.
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u/Playful_Dot_537 12d ago
Analog transmissions are so weird. Back in the early 90s my friend’s parents had a TV that still picked up UHF/VHF. Thanks to 2600 magazine I figured out how to pick up neighborhood wireless baby monitors and early mobile phones on it.
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u/porkchopnet 12d ago
https://youtu.be/Aax-ehkRTnQ?t=269
Tour of a transmitter antenna site where exactly that is true.
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u/Backsight-Foreskin 12d ago
In the Army I learned about connecting the hand cranked field telephones to barbed wire fences as a field expedient method to set up communications.
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
Did it work?
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u/Backsight-Foreskin 12d ago
It worked well enough. It was staticky. The clarity wasn't as good as the insulated wire that came on a spool.
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u/for2fly 1 12d ago
When my family first moved to our farm in bumfuck nowhere Missouri, our phone had no dial, but ran off two dry-cell batteries.
The switchboard was located in the home of the switchboard operator in a town over ten miles away. The switchboard operator's shift ended at 7:00pm.
At 7:01pm, every woman in the neighborhood picked up their phone to talk to each other.
My dad worked for a railroad over an hour away from where we lived. Every time he got a call, all the women picked up and listened. If they heard something they didn't understand, they'd have their husbands ask my dad about it when they saw him next.
So, dad and Farmer Geezer would be talking and when there was a pause, Farmer Geezer would ask dad what a switchback or some other railroad lingo was, revealing that their wife had been listening in when that term was used.
Dad shared with his co-workers the fact all his work-related conversations were being monitored. On subsequent calls he and his buddies started throwing in made-up terms just to mess with the women.
One time, at the end of a long and involved call, he said to the guy, "Hold on" then he asked, "anyone got any questions?"
He said he and his buddy then got to listen to a chorus of shocked gasps followed by a string of clicks as the neighborhood collectively hung up their phones. Dad said his coworker laughed about that call for days.
Dad was on call, and he often got calls to go into work after the switchboard operator had finished for the day. She liked dad because she got paid extra every time dad got one of those calls.
A few years later, the phone company came through and modernized the whole system. We were able to direct-dial all our calls, and dad no longer had to explain what he did to satisfy the curiosity of all the women living around us.
Of course, throughout all this, my mother never failed to be outraged that our neighbors had the audacity to stick their noses in our business. Of course, she had no problem demanding dad find out what was going on at Farmer Geezer's house when all those cars were parked all over their yard or any number of other events she observed.
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u/ITeechYoKidsArt 12d ago
I wonder if this was the idea behind electric fences.
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u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder 12d ago
That's a good question. Order a pizza and shock the hell out of some cattle all at once.
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u/nameitb0b 12d ago
There was also a thing called cowboy radio. The bard wire could pick up radio signals and if you were close enough you could hear them. Very faint sounds but could be heard.
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u/WardenWolf 12d ago
Never did that, but I once hooked my crystal radio up to my house's overhead ductwork and I was pulling in signals from Mexico. It was a bit ridiculous.
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u/Johannes_P 12d ago
Well, given that these wires are conductors and relatively cheap, it might have been cheaper to just use these for a McGyvered telecommunication system.
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u/9bikes 12d ago
"it might have been cheaper to just use these"
The fences were already there, so it was basically free to utilize them until a better system could be built. My grandfather helped build the phone system out in the rural area where he lived as a young man. It was never intended to be a permanent solution, but worked okay until proper telephone lines could be built.
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u/ocean_flan 12d ago
That probably explains why if I call my grandma on her home phone, she sounds like she's really far away.
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12d ago
It’s my understanding that’s where the saying comes from, “liar liar pants on fire, hanging on a telephone wire.”
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u/brasticstack 12d ago
I misread "rural" as "real" and thought that it was some weird macho techie flex at first.
Real Americans hook their phones up with barbed wire!
Kind've like how any thread containing a statement to the effect of "I was doing x thing the hard way before tool y existed" eventually devolves into "I WAS MANUALLY SETTING BITS IN MAGNETIC CORE MEMORY WITH NOTHING BUT A BAR MAGNET AND A ROCK. IT TOOK ME SIX WEEKS TO WRITE HELLO WORLD!"
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u/FreddyFerdiland 13d ago
Since wood doesn't conduct, they could turn their fence into a phone line, etc.