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kottke.org posts about Alexander Graham Bell

Yes, barbed wire fenced cows but also provided telecommunications

Barbed wire is one of the most important inventions of the past 150 years. It tamed the Wild West and solidified the concept of land ownership in America. Tim Harford, author of Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, writes:

After Europeans arrived and pushed west, the cowboys roamed free, herding cattle over the boundless plains.

But settlers needed fences, not least to keep those free-roaming cattle from trampling their crops. And there wasn’t a lot of wood โ€” certainly none to spare for fencing in mile after mile of what was often called “The American Desert”.

Farmers tried growing thorn-bush hedges, but they were slow-growing and inflexible. Smooth wire fences didn’t work either โ€” the cattle simply pushed through them.

Barbed wire changed what the Homestead Act could not.

Until it was developed, the prairie was an unbounded space, more like an ocean than a stretch of arable land.

Private ownership of land wasn’t common because it wasn’t feasible.

With demand came fierce competition; there were dozens of different types of barbed wire:

Barbed Wire Types

Just two years after Joseph Glidden patented his design for barbed wire in 1874, another of the 19th century’s great inventions burst onto the scene in the form of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. The two world-changing technologies would combine in a surprising way in the western United States. Because of the expense of running dedicated telephone services over long distances, some farmers opted to run their telecommunications over the hundreds of thousands of miles of barbed wire criss-crossing the land.

It was in building the network connecting homestead to homestead that the farmers’ ingenuity came to the fore. Instead of erecting new poles and wires, many either ran phone wires along the top of wooden fence posts or used the barbed wire itself to carry signals. The latter hardly worked as well as insulated copper wire, but with the lines already in place, installation and operating costs could be kept to a minimum. By one estimate, service ran a mere $3 to $18 a year, far less than the regional phone companies charged, and labor for maintaining the network was supplied by volunteers.

So cool. I’m reading A Mind at Play right now. It’s a biography of Claude Shannon, “the architect of the information age”. As a boy, Shannon wired the half-mile stretch of barbed wire fence between his family’s farm and a friend’s house:

He charged it himself: he hooked up dry-cell batteries at each end, and spliced spare wire into any gaps to run the current unbroken. Insulation was anything at hand: leather straps, glass bottlenecks, corncobs, inner-tube pieces. Keypads at each end โ€” one at his house on North Center Street, the other at his friend’s house half a mile away โ€” made it a private barbed-wire telegraph. Even insulated, it is apt to be silenced for months in the ice and snow that accumulate on it, at the knuckle of Michigan middle finger. But when the fence thaws and Claude patches the wire, and the current runs again from house to house, he can speak again at lightspeed and, best of all, in code.

In the 1920s, when Claude was a boy, some three million farmers talked through networks like these, wherever the phone company found it unprofitable to build. It was America’s folk grid. Better networks than Claude’s carried voices along the fences, and kitchens and general stores doubled at switchboards.

(via mr)

Update: See also the Devil’s Rope episode of 99% Invisible. (thx, dave)


The father of the telephone speaks

Alexander Graham Bell famously participated in the first telephone call, but until very recently, we had no idea how his voice sounded. Then researchers used high-resolution optical scans of old audio discs and cylinders and converted them to audio…and found a short passage recited by Bell:

If you can’t quite catch it, Bell is saying “hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”


Bell’s telegraph killer

Word is trickling out of Bell Labs that Alexander Graham Bell is developing a device that will supplant the telegraph.

While the technology behind the Telephone is new, the design is reassuringly old-fashioned, reminiscent of a phrenologist’s horn or ear-candle in form. We found the experience far more comfortable than the one we had with the Telegraph, though fatigue from magnetic waves is inevitable in the use of each. This is a minor complaint, however, as we could scarcely imagine using such a device for more than a few minutes a day.

Update: Meanwhile, back in the real world, F. Marion Crawford had this to say back in 1896:

The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius โ€” over the everlasting telephone of course โ€” published every morning for the whole world….

The everlasting telephone!


Maureen Dowd interviews telephone inventor

Ha! Maureen Dowd interviews Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

ME: The telephone seems like letter-writing without the paper and pen. Is there any message that can’t wait for a passenger pigeon?

BELL: Possibly the message I’d like to deliver to you right now.

ME: Why did you think the answer to telegrams was a noisy new telegram?

BELL: We have designed the receiver so you can leave it off the hook.

See also The Victorian Internet. (thx, @evamaria_m)


Did Alexander Graham Bell drink Elisha Gray’s

Did Alexander Graham Bell drink Elisha Gray’s telephone-flavored milkshake?

On May 22, 1886, The Washington Post published a shocking front-page scoop: Zenas F. Wilber, a former Washington patent examiner, swore in an affidavit that he’d been bribed by an attorney for Alexander Graham Bell to award Bell the patent for the telephone over a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, who’d filed a patent document on the same day as Bell in 1876.

Even though Bell has been legally vindicated on this issue, Seth Shulman’s new book, The Telephone Gambit, suggests that he did in fact steal a key idea from Elisha Gray. (via house next door)