#joseph glidden

[niudl-blog]

Superior Barbed Wire Factory, DeKalb, IL, c.1898 | W. W. Embree Collection | NIU Digital Library

This photograph shows the Superior Barbed Wire Company factory on South Second Street in DeKalb, Illinois, circa 1898. Barbed wire production became this city’s major industry in the late nineteenth century, following Joseph Glidden’s patent on an effective design for its use in 1874.

Posted by Drew VandeCreek, Director of Digital Scholarship, Northern Illinois University Libraries

[room-where-it-happens]

By the way, the guy behind #BestNonPol is on #TeamGlidden, inventor of barbed wire. So there’s that.

[principleofplenitude]

Like inventors from Joseph Guillotin to Alfred Nobel, whose creations escaped their original purpose and were yoked to evil ends, Joseph Glidden would have been shocked at what became of his. In 1874, the Illinois farmer and New Hampshire native, fastening sharpened metal knots along thick threads of steel, created barbed wire. Thanks to its high resilience and low cost, the rapid installation of the coils and lasting dissuasion of the barbs, the wire transformed the American West. Ranchers could protect their cattle against predators, both wild and human, as they pushed the frontier ever further west. The wire itself came to be called “devil’s rope.” The results were deep and lasting. As Dempsey Rae, the scarred cowboy played by Kirk Douglas in “Man Without a Star,” declared about the wire: “I don’t like it or the people who use it.” More real and tragic than disgruntled cowboys intent on their freedom, however, was the fate of the Native Americans. They were not jailed behind barbed wire outright, but the Dawes Act allowed all “excess” land not claimed by individual Native Americans to be sold to ranchers, who immediately enclosed their lands with barbed wire, thus crippling the traditional migration and hunting patterns of the tribes. But as the world discovered quickly, they were not the last.

“The tangled history of barbed wire” from Boston Globe Ideas

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the 200th birthday of a man who changed the face of the American West: Joseph Glidden, born in Charlestown, New Hampshire (1813). He was a farmer, and when he settled in DeKalb, Illinois, he realized that the stone and wood fences of his native Northeast weren't practical out on the Great Plains. There weren't too many trees to provide rails, so building materials had to be shipped out West, and that was expensive. People needed a cheaper way to keep livestock out of their crops. Wire fencing was much cheaper to produce and transport, only plain wire was no good, because cattle would just push up against the fence and flatten it. So Glidden used an old coffee mill to bend little pieces of wire into barbs. Then he stuck the barbs in between two long strands of straight wire that had been twisted together, locking them in place. Glidden wasn't the only person with this idea, but he perfected it, and he also invented a machine to make manufacturing the wire quicker and easier. He patented his barbed wire method in 1874, and spent the next three years in court, battling over whether he had in fact invented it. He won, and formed the Barb Fence Company. To prove that his wire worked, Glidden set up the "Frying Pan Ranch" near Amarillo, Texas. He fenced the ranch and brought in 12,000 cattle, which he branded. When Texans saw that none of Glidden's cattle strayed from the ranch, they were sold on this cheap new invention. Barbed wire made Glidden a millionaire; he was one of the richest men in America by the time he died in 1906. The coming of barbed-wire fencing completely changed life in the West. Homesteaders began fencing in their property, and that marked the end of free-ranging herds, and the end of massive cattle drives, and the end of the cowboy. The wire sparked range wars between big ranchers who wanted to protect their land and water claims, and the smaller-scale cattlemen and "free rangers," who would cut the fences wherever they found them. Nomadic tribes of Native Americans could no longer travel freely across the Great Plains.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/01/18