Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

by force; but where would the money come from to stop those herds of animals in this vast new land of the West?

      The West had all those animals, and it did not have the means to stop them. The traditional materials of fencing were scarce, the most traditional of them—wood—nearly absent. Even the earth, a dusty, crumbling land—ideal for the grass—did not produce the right sort of stones. And while hedges could and were grown, they had their own limitations. As George Basalla, a historian of technology, notes for Osage oranges (the most prominent hedges of the American West in the 1860s and 1870s), “They were slow to develop, could not be moved easily, cast shadows on adjoining crops, usurped valuable growing space, and provided a shelter for weeds, vermin and insects.”²² In other words, hedges were inappropriate for the special colonization process going on in the American West, in which vast stretches of land were brought under control during a brief span of time, and the entire process was to be achieved with maximum flexibility and profit. This was colonization driven not by the life cycles of growing populations but by the expectations of capitalist investment. The three to four years it took an Osage orange to grow (as well as its element of waste) now became a major drawback. Four years, in the life of the plains, could be an eternity—the time it took, for instance, for Abilene to become a center for the cow industry and then to get out of that industry altogether. Geography was shifting daily. Something had to be found, quickly, to control the cows.

      Fencing materials had to be imported, and the growing rail network—the essential infrastructure for the entire growth of agriculture in the West—transported those materials. Wood was shipped to the West in vast quantities; after all, American houses were built of wood in the West, just as they were in the East, and the railroad itself consumed timber.²³ But the vastness of the spaces involved made such shipping doubly unprofitable for wooden fences—both because of the vastness of spaces to be enclosed by such fences and because of the vastness of the space to be traversed by railroads put in place to carry such loads.

      Thus a new technology for fencing was made a necessity—as stressed by the literature on the invention of barbed wire. But notice that the necessity was made by people, not given by nature. It did not derive from sheer geography—the presence of this space, the absence of those woods. It derived from the way in which America sprang upon the West, to enmesh it, almost in an instant, into its economy.

      But let us return to the problem as it was perceived by individual Americans. They confronted animals; they were trying to control them. Such a task could be conceived as a kind of education: how to get an animal to do as you wish? This is essentially how the task was perceived in 1873 by Henry Rose, a farmer in the village of Waterman Station, Illinois. Trying to control a “breachy” cow, as he referred to her, he conceived of the following plan. He attached a wooden board, studded with sharp pieces of wire, right next to her head. Thus the cow, he reasoned, would be cured of her mischievous tendency to pass through loose fences. Now whenever she tried to squeeze herself through a limited space, pushing against barriers, she would cause herself considerable pain.²⁴ Of course, the idea of education through pain was familiar. Children at the time, after all, would regularly have their bare feet lashed with hickory sticks for failing to remember the multiplication table.²⁵ Children needed to learn arithmetic, and animals needed to learn fences. There are even specific precedents for Rose’s experiment: for instance, we may compare it to the triangular yokes with which hogs were collared in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.²⁶ These yokes were intended to prevent hogs physically from crossing through fences, rather than to make pain ensue from such attempts; but essentially Rose’s idea was an extension of the idea of the collar and similar attachments to the bodies of animals. The wooden board served as a tool for constant surveillance and punishment, even in the absence of the human. After a while, it occurred to Rose that the fence itself could teach its own respect, serve as its own surveyor; instead of the sharp wire being attached to the cow’s head, it could be attached to boards of wood on the fence itself. The experiment made, Rose was satisfied: the cow learned not to approach the fence. Other Americans made similar trials during the same period. Adrian Latta, for instance, attached sharp spikes to the bottom of his family’s fences (he himself was only ten years old at the time, 1861) to prevent hogs from crossing underneath. He noted that “the hogs got through a few times after the barbs were put in. However, the barbs had the desired effect as the owner saw his hogs were getting terribly marked and kept them at home.”²⁷ So instead of education, Latta’s aim was sheer violence—aimed directly at hogs, indirectly at humans. If Latta’s inspiration was perhaps nothing more than juvenile sadism, William D. Hunt took as an inspiration the venerable idea of the spur. This ancient invention consists of a roughly cut piece of metal that, thrust against the flesh of the animal, goads it to abrupt reaction. Hunt’s patent, issued in 1867, positioned spur wheels on wire. The animal, pushing against the wire, would be wounded, though real injury would be prevented as the spur wheel turned under the animal’s thrust. This, in retrospect, was a mistake: Hunt’s spur wheels were, so to speak, too lenient, so that animals were not ultimately deterred by them. The same went for Michael Kelly’s patent in 1868: cut nails thrust into wire. Once again, the nails would simply rotate on their wire when pushed against by the animals. Still, Kelly was sufficiently concerned about the injury this might cause to animals that he called for tarred rope to be strung along the fence so that animals could see it in the dark and not get accidentally injured.²⁸ The peculiar experience of Henry Rose was meaningful: by starting from a corrective collar, he was prepared to the fundamental idea that, by causing pain, the fence could create the habit of its own avoidance. The genius of the new technology was that—once again—the cow’s habits and skills were enlisted against her. Rose’s fence acted not on the cow’s skin alone but also on her memory and judgment, and these were ultimately used for her control. No need for the farmer to constrain his violence, then; make the cow feel the pain, and she will do the rest. Ultimately this was how hedges functioned—and the Osage orange, in particular, was protected by sharp, strong, long barbs, in retrospect highly suggestive of barbed wire.²⁹ Rose patented his idea and took it to be displayed in a farm exhibition in De Kalb, Illinois, near his hometown.

      Notice that, with Rose’s invention, iron barbs supplemented wood and did not replace it. However—as we have seen with some alternative inventions—others were already experimenting with materials. In the mid-nineteenth century, organic components gave way rapidly to their metallic counterparts. Iron production was exploding, and the material was searching for applications. In 1852, Samuel Fox invented the use of wire ribs for the frames of umbrellas—a huge British industry—replacing whalebone; the same was happening in the (generally similar) industry of corsets. Staying in the same domestic setting, we may take the production of strings for musical instruments; here, once again, wire became cheap enough around midcentury to begin to replace the guts of sheep. With the mass production of steel wire at mid-century, the piano began to be mass-produced as well—a major development in European culture. Umbrellas, corsets, and pianos were all important industries. Closer to home, though, for the interests of American farmers, was the production of rope, revolutionized in the 1840s as hemp began to be substituted by iron. Iron strings had tremendous strength, and most important, machines could be produced to automatically strand such strings into a braided rope.³⁰ This immediately suggests an idea: if the linear strings can be twisted together to construct stronger ropes, attached linearly, they can also be netted together, on a planar pattern—a fence made of wire. These, of course, are a familiar feature of our own contemporary landscape: fences made of woven lattices of wire, once again an invention of the 1840s and the 1850s. Butts and Johnson from Boston, for instance, advertised their “patent wire fencing” in 1856 “for enclosing railroads, canals, fields, cattle pastures, cemeteries, gardens, heneries, and for ornamental garden work, grape and rose trellises, etc.”³¹ Whatever were the real hopes of Butts and Johnson, such lattices did not fence in cattle: these structures are rather delicate and are made even more vulnerable by the contraction and expansion of iron under changes in temperature. Even determined humans can, with patience, run down such fences; they are no obstacle at all for herds of cows.³²

      It is here, finally, that barbed wire comes in. One of the visitors to the De Kalb fair, Joseph E Glidden, formed the following idea: instead of attaching Rose’s barbs to wood, they could be coiled around one of