Editor’s note: we’re looking this week at the many changes brought on by the invention of widespread distribution of barbed wire. This is the fifth in a five-part series.
Telephones were a marvel when they first came to Idaho. Insulated copper wires strung from pole to pole soon became ubiquitous in cities and towns. But Ma Bell was reluctant to string that expensive wire to rural residences. Their cost per customer was just more than could be justified in the early days, so the phone companies (there were many telephone companies until consolidation came around the turn of the century).
But farmers and ranchers needed to communicate, too, even more so than city residents who could walk a couple of blocks and knock on a neighbor’s door.
Ranchers and farmers often skipped the phone companies and set up systems of their own when they realized they already had lines strung from house to house along the pastures and row crops: barbed wire.
Turning that prickly fencing into a phone line was no great trick. You just ran a wire from each house to the fence, then made sure there was a continuous connection all the way along. That meant tall poles on either side of the gates, with slender wire crawling up them and across pole to pole.
Sometimes as many as 20 telephones were wired together in a farming community. That worked pretty well, but it was a bit tiresome listening to the phones wing when you had a one-in-20 chance the call was for you. Users came up with ring codes to distinguish who they were trying to reach. Your ring might be two longs and short. It was a little like Morse Code. If you had too many people in your system you’d spend all day counting longs and shorts.
Crude as the system was and poor as the sound quality was, it was still a better way of communicating than sending some kid ten miles on a horse to fetch a doctor.
Telephones were a marvel when they first came to Idaho. Insulated copper wires strung from pole to pole soon became ubiquitous in cities and towns. But Ma Bell was reluctant to string that expensive wire to rural residences. Their cost per customer was just more than could be justified in the early days, so the phone companies (there were many telephone companies until consolidation came around the turn of the century).
But farmers and ranchers needed to communicate, too, even more so than city residents who could walk a couple of blocks and knock on a neighbor’s door.
Ranchers and farmers often skipped the phone companies and set up systems of their own when they realized they already had lines strung from house to house along the pastures and row crops: barbed wire.
Turning that prickly fencing into a phone line was no great trick. You just ran a wire from each house to the fence, then made sure there was a continuous connection all the way along. That meant tall poles on either side of the gates, with slender wire crawling up them and across pole to pole.
Sometimes as many as 20 telephones were wired together in a farming community. That worked pretty well, but it was a bit tiresome listening to the phones wing when you had a one-in-20 chance the call was for you. Users came up with ring codes to distinguish who they were trying to reach. Your ring might be two longs and short. It was a little like Morse Code. If you had too many people in your system you’d spend all day counting longs and shorts.
Crude as the system was and poor as the sound quality was, it was still a better way of communicating than sending some kid ten miles on a horse to fetch a doctor.
An 1887 illustration of Bell’s Magneto telephone system. Library of Congress.
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