
Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together - signa11
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history
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phikai
99% Invisible did a great story on this called Devil's Rope [0]. It's pretty
amazing what people were able to accomplish.

[0] - [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-
rope/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/)

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jagger27
Stories like this help me stay a little bit hopeful that if (or more
cynically, when) the time comes, we can roll out independent mesh networks to
connect ourselves. If our grandparents and great-grandparents could do it, why
can't we?

Hell, ADSL works over a piece of wet string.
[https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html](https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html)

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j_s
Not a dupe but this was linked on both of these discussions five days ago:

Ethernet over barbed wire |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910263)

ADSL over wet string |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107)

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tantalor
Astonishing how this article does not once use the phrase "party line".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_\(telephony\))

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notatoad
my aunt and uncle's farm in interior BC had this setup until the late 90s,
well into the 56K modem era. Remember other people in your house yelling at
you to turn off the internet because they had to use the phone? Imagine that
scaled up to a dozen houses :)

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sandworm101
Small world. I spent some long weekends at a cabin on green lake (BC interior)
with a party line.

Party lines used standard telephone lines. The joke was that they had nothing
to do with the cost of the wire. The cost of the wire is a tiny part of the
cost of installing the system. It was the phone company not wanting to install
the switching gear. Sometimes the party line was tied together within BC-
Tell's box. So when they installed better switching gear everyone suddenly had
their own line. That's different than barbwire rigs that ran over single
lines. (BC-Tell is now called "telus")

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coldacid
Pretty sure BC-Tel only has the one L in it.

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IronWolve
My folks power company buried the power lines in the rural areas to avoid
trees falling and causing outages. They should have ran cable or fiber while
doing this, total waste of man power and work. Too far for DSL but they have
power.

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Aloha
Something else to bear in mind - most of these 'farmers lines' were one wire
circuits - so single wire for talking, earth ground return, local talk battery
at each instrument on the circuit too.

You'd get all sorts of atmospherics and other noises during even calm weather
(more in storms) (squeals, howling sounds, humming sounds, etc) - figure you
basically have an aerial, with an induction coil, a speaker and a mic.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Still beats yelling.

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s0rce
What about carrier pigeons?

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DoreenMichele
Today, rural internet development is fairly often compared to delivering phone
and electricity back in the day. It, too, is sometimes a homegrown affair
because it isn't profitable to commercial establishments, yet can serve as a
vital lifeline connecting isolated people to the larger world.

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abraae
A friend's rural internet connection was getting 50kb throughput recently. It
turned out the line was lying across an electric fence. Clearing it got him
back up to his usual 1mb

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betterunix2
Sounds similar to how amateur radio systems are used by people in rural
places, or Fidonet, or other hacked together solutions to common problems.
Ultimately these seem to be stopgap measures that are replaced by utilities in
the long run.

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gxs
Side comment, but I saw this on an HN comment about a week or two ago and
since then I've seen it front page here, reddit, and other newsfeeds.

I wonder which of the following apply:

1) It's always been a popular post and I never noticed it

2) It was already catching fire and seeing it on HN was part of that spread

3) It became popular because of HN

Always curious to see the life cycle of how these things develope

~~~
Jun8
Atlas Obscura send emails regularly with new stories, people post them when
they get them.

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skookumchuck
It illustrates how delightfully simple an invention telephony is. I'm
surprised with all the effort that went into improving telegraphy that nobody
had stumbled upon it sooner.

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is0tope
Funny to see this as I just read about this curious telephony solution in the
book "The Master Switch".

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mml
It's said that Claude Shannon experienced this growing up in rural _Michigan.

_ edit: Apparently not North Dakota

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skookumchuck
What wasn't clear to me in the article was whether these lines were connected
to the wider telephone system, or was isolated to the barbed wire locals.

