The History of Barbed Wire Fence Telephone Networks

If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you'll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically.

You'll also notice that within the section on wired networks, there are two sub-sections: one for electrical wire and another for barbed wire.

Even though the barbed wire section is quite short, it was one of the most fascinating to research and write about – mostly because the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surpr