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Atrocious but efficient: How ranchers used barbed wire to make phone calls

A barbed wire telephone call didn’t sound great but could quickly warn
others about something such as a wildfire.

IFRAME: [118]https://atx.audio/3JDl8az

By W. F. StrongDecember 29, 2021 11:01 am[119]Agriculture & Animals,
[120]Arts & Culture, [121]History, [122]Stories From Texas, [123]Texas
Standard Original

pixabay.com/pixel2013

Historian J. Evetts Haley wrote that, in its time, the old XIT Ranch up
in the Texas Panhandle was “probably the largest fenced range in the
world.” He recalled that its barbed wire enclosed over 3 million acres
of land. At the north end alone, the fence ran for 162 miles. The
unique enclosure helped keep in enormous cattle herds, keep out
rustlers, and also gave rise to the creative use of a new technology:
the telephone.

I’ll come back to the XIT in a moment, but first, consider these
smattering of reports from that era. In 1897, The Electrical Review,
reported that “on a ranch in California, telephone communication had
been established between the various camps . . . by means of barbed
wire fences.” The article says the novel use of the phone was a great
success and was being used in Texas as well. That same year, the New
England Journal of Agriculture was impressed that two Kansas farmers,
living a mile apart, had attached fine telephone instruments to the
barbed wire fence that connects their places and established easy
communication. From the Butte Intermountain in 1902 we see this notice:
“Fort Benton’s latest development is a barbed wire telephone
communication.” The article points out that people of the range were
not all that happy with barbed wire, which they thought was an “evil”
that had arrived with the railroad, but they had decided to look at the
practical side of its existence and use it to create a telephone
exchange that would connect all the ranches to Fort Benton.

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On the XIT, given that the ranch covered over 4,500 square miles, there
was interest in creating a communication system that would be more
efficient than sending out fast riders to distant camps. “In the early
1900’s,” Haley reported, “a great many telephones were placed upon the
ranch. Where possible, the top line of the fences was used as a
telephone line, though the ‘service’ was atrocious.” It did allow for
quick communication concerning emergencies such as a grass fire that
required all cowboys immediately. There was even talk among technology
geeks of the era that cowboys could carry phones wherever they went and
clip on to the fence to report problems they encountered. Haley said
that the old cowboys no doubt scoffed at the notion of carrying phones
in their saddlebags to squawk about every escaped bull or rattlesnake
bite they came across.

The cowboys, always ingenious when it came to invention, perfected the
barbed wire phone systems by adding insulators. They’d use old broken
whiskey bottles and soda pop bottles – particularly the necks of them —
to put under the wire to lift it off the fence and improve
conductivity. This made the signal go further and clarified the voices
they carried.

The rudimentary phone systems of the ranches led to more creative
thinking about rural phone systems in general. Dr. Don Anderson, who
has his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and is a
technological historian, told me that that barbed wire phone systems
led to the analogical conclusion that “using whatever is already in
place is smart planning.” So, when rural Texas wanted to extend phone
service from town to town, the engineers came up with the idea that
they could use the existing rural power lines, already installed by the
Rural Electrification Act and run the phone signal right through the
electric lines – just at a different frequency. That saved a lot of
money and brought phone service along with electricity to rural areas.

[125]More Like This: The Story Behind Texas’ Favorite Butter

Still, many ranches liked their barbed wire systems and kept them, even
though the voice quality wasn’t nearly as good. As late as the early
1970’s a dairy farmer I knew had a barbed wire phone running from his
house a half mile to the barn. He said it was good for talking to his
wife about what time supper was. But most of all he said, “It’s free. I
don’t have to pay Ma Bell nothing for that phone, and I enjoy thinking
that it’s a burr in their saddle.”

Dr. Anderson told me it’s quite fascinating to consider that what
started as a fence system on the XIT evolved really into what is the
XIT Communications which serves that region today. XIT Communications
provides phone service and high speed internet to rural communities in
the footprint of the original ranch – and more.

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a
donation to support it [126]here. Your gift helps pay for everything
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donating today.

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