Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Ben on January 10, 2022, 12:52:13 PM
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Wow, this is a rather ingenious thing that I had never heard of: In the early 20th century, various ranchers used their barbed wire fences as transmission lines so that cowboys could telephone each other while on the range.
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/atrocious-but-efficient-how-ranchers-used-barbed-wire-to-make-phone-calls/
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Interesting. I hadn't heard of that.
I guess they could have a central hub that powers the wire and the portable sets just hook in? Works good if the voltage isn't dangerous and you can get the insulators set up. It would need some regular maintenance to repair breaks and look for shorts or broken insulators.
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I have heard of that, but only passingly. I know similar systems were used on farms to communicate with the various outbuildings. I've seen the remnants of a few in Pennsylvania.
Here's a bit of a deeper article on the subject: https://gizmodo.com/barbed-wire-fences-were-an-early-diy-telephone-network-1493157700
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Wouldn't work with metal t posts and wire (grounding issues), but would with old wooden posts. Just need to two wires and battery phone sets with crank ringers.
If I recall my days as a telephone lineman one summer in college, its 48 volts DC to talk and 105 AC to ring. No amps on the AC.
I did get burnt pretty good working a buried cable at a pedestal in a flooded ditch. I was repairing a twisted pair and someone rang in on the line, standing in water with bare hands I couldn't let go of the pair until the person quit ringing.
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Shocking.
"Wouldn't work with metal t posts and wire (grounding issues), but would with old wooden posts. Just need to two wires and battery phone sets with crank ringers. "
Would work just fine with metal posts... IF the wire is on insulators. The article said that in the early days they would use bottles on the wooden posts to provide even better insulation (my guess is in rain the posts would ground out and the system would become useless.
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Shocking.
"Wouldn't work with metal t posts and wire (grounding issues), but would with old wooden posts. Just need to two wires and battery phone sets with crank ringers. "
Would work just fine with metal posts... IF the wire is on insulators. The article said that in the early days they would use bottles on the wooden posts to provide even better insulation (my guess is in rain the posts would ground out and the system would become useless.
Insulated barbed fire on t posts isn't common, if you run a hot wire, it is a single strand of a solid wire offset by insulators from the posts.
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Insulated barbed fire on t posts isn't common, if you run a hot wire, it is a single strand of a solid wire offset by insulators from the posts.
T posts also weren't common when people started doing this, either... in the 1880s and 1890s.
Insulated barbed wire wasn't a thing back then, either. As noted in the article, when people started doing this with barbed wire, they started ADDING insulators between the wire and the post to improve performance.
In other words, they modified what existed at the time.
Had steel posts been common at that time, I have no doubt that they would have modified those, as well.
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My big brother and I had a wired system between our bedroom windows using those huge ignition batteries
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prc68.com%2FI%2FImages%2FNo6-1DRays.jpg&hash=e4f792abea7c4bd20013b93bcf06947f997ed603)
and war surplus carbon mikes and earphones.
Was all kinds of silly, since our bedroom doors were right next to each other, but.... SCIENCE ! And TEENAGERS ! And BRAGGIN' RIGHTS !
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T posts also weren't common when people started doing this, either... in the 1880s and 1890s.
Insulated barbed wire wasn't a thing back then, either. As noted in the article, when people started doing this with barbed wire, they started ADDING insulators between the wire and the post to improve performance.
In other words, they modified what existed at the time.
Had steel posts been common at that time, I have no doubt that they would have modified those, as well.
I was referring to doing it now a days, not back in 1880.
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I was referring to doing it now a days, not back in 1880.
Why the hell would you want to try something like this today? No sense in doing so in the day of radio, cell phones, e-mail.
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Why the hell would you want to try something like this today? No sense in doing so in the day of radio, cell phones, e-mail.
One of the ranches I hunt in Wyoming is mostly a cellular dead spot. The mountains on the ranch can also play havoc with line of sight radio.
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Smoke signals, Charbyhontas!
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Smoke signals, Charbyhontas!
That's Most Honorable War Chief Charbyhontas.
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I vaguely remember that you were supposed to be able to do ARCNET over similarly pessimal media.