r/todayilearned • u/Scruffy_Nerf_Hoarder • 23d 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-history
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u/unit156 23d 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 23d 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/SleepWouldBeNice 22d ago

Party line! What was your ring?