Barbed Wire Hedge

With all the fencing that we are doing I have inevitably cut my hands to ribbons. Really between farming and glass cutting my days as a hand model (!!) are well and truly behind me.....

So I thought I would research (ie wikipedia!) barbed wire and who thought up this clever but dangerous  invention. The first wire that was not just a single strand was made in France by Leonce Eugene Grassin-Baledans in 1860. His design consisted of bristling points, creating a fence that was painful to cross. In April 1865 Louis François Janin patented a double wire with diamond-shaped metal barbs.

More patents followed, and in 1867 alone there were six issued for barbed wire in the US. Only two of them addressed livestock deterrence, one of which was from American Lucien B. Smith of Ohio. The movement westward across the American Great Plains meant that ranchers needed to fence their land in against encroaching farmers and other graziers. The railroads throughout the growing West needed to keep livestock off their tracks, and farmers needed to keep stray cattle from trampling their crops. Traditional fence materials like wood and stone, were expensive to use and hedging was not reliable.

By the mid 1870s there were as many as 150 companies manufacturing barbed wire in the US to cash in on the demand in the West: investors were aware that the business did not require much capital and it was considered that almost anyone with enough determination could make a profit from manufacture of a new wire.  There was then a sharp decline in the number of manufacturing firms, as many were consolidated into larger companies, notably the American Steel and Wire Company, formed by the merging of Gates's, Washburn's and Ellwood's industries.
Smaller companies were wiped out because of economies of scale and the smaller pool of consumers available to them, compared to the larger corporations. The American Steel and Wire Company established in 1899 employed vertical integration: it controlled all aspects of production from producing the steel rods to making many different wire and nail products from the same steel; although later part of U.S. Steel, the production of barbed wire would still be a major source of revenue.

So barbed wire has become the choice of almost all graziers for fencing in animals....if only we could develop fencing that kept the native animals out effectively!!