Barbed Wire: Glidden's Coffee Mill Patent to Range Wars and Trenches

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After the Civil War, settlers on the treeless Great Plains had no stone or timber for fences. In 1872 farmers near Fresno, California spent nearly $4,000 fencing a 2,500-acre wheat crop with shipped-in wood, and Osage orange hedges grew too slowly. At the 1873 DeKalb, Illinois county fair, Henry Rose showed a wooden strip with metal points to hang on wire. Watching were farmer Joseph Glidden, hardware dealer Isaac Ellwood and lumber merchant Jacob Haish. Glidden used parts of his wife's coffee mill to coil barbs and a grindstone to twist a second wire around them, locking the barbs in place. Despite Haish's interference challenge, he won his patent in November 1874 and named it The Winner.

In 1876 salesman John Warren Gates penned wild Texas cattle inside a barbed wire corral on San Antonio's Military Plaza, and the wire held. Enclosure set off the Texas fence cutting wars, which led the legislature in an 1884 special session to make fence cutting a felony. In the winter of 1885 drifting herds froze against Panhandle fences in the Big Die Up. The wire then went to war: Portuguese troops at Magul in 1895, British camps during the Boer War, and the trenches of the First World War. It later enclosed Manzanar, Nazi camps such as Auschwitz, and East Germany's border.

• Lucien B. Smith of Ohio had patented an early thorny fence idea in 1867.
• A properly built fence holds up to half a ton of tension, anchored by braced corner posts rather than the line posts.
• Installers tie the wire to corner posts with a hand-tied timber hitch because crimp sleeves fatigue and slip.
• Artillery blasts and shrapnel often passed through the open wire of First World War entanglements without cutting it.
• Wiring parties twisted corkscrew-shaped screw pickets silently into no man's land at night instead of hammering posts.