1. Introduction to Barbed Wire Fences

Like practically every American invention, steel barbed wire was invented because of a great and growing need, and because the inventors’ time had come. The invention was made at a time when the needs of a whole world met American enterprise. The world scarcely knew any necessity for such a product until then. But the need was always there, as became apparent when the fences ran above and below the vast prairies of the west, cutting a new kind of country into the old-square, manageable acres that answered to Old World physical divisions. There are still vast areas in the world where the change is being hailed with delight, mixed with fear, or plain, unreasoned jealousy or hatred.

One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was the humble barbed wire fence. It has seriously affected the history of all countries where it has been used. Yet it is often taken for granted, seldom remembered, and even cursed by many unthinking people as if it were a monster. Yet it retards erosion, stops grazing and trampling of buildings and water impoundments, conserves the water-soil complex, and saves many serene hill lands that would be wasted and useless if native livestock flocks or advancing land clearances were not stopped. Properly placed barbed wire is permanent and reckons with the cost of interest, as opposed to perishable fences, none of which are completely adequate, once established. For many generations, those who use or look upon a country will be affected by barbed wire and the symbol of restraint and possession it stands for.

2. Development and Evolution of Barbed Wire Fences

By 1877, about 450 million acres of land had been enclosed by settlers who waited out the harshness of pioneer life but lived within a thin skin of protection without deeper experience. Shortgrass land spread in a network of narrow belts alternating with semidesert breaks. One of the intersecting belts, the leading edge of settlement of the Western United States, ran through the trans-United States rail corridor that extended west of the Missouri River. As the soil was settled by the companies that had been awarded the land by the federal land grants, it was sealed by barbed wire, an unparalleled invention coupled with the telegraph, of late 19th-century America.

Before the development of barbed wire, agriculture was, at best, risky and, at worst, impossible. Every year, fifty million buffalo had churned up, trampled down, and chewed over sagebrush and prairie grasses that held water-bearing soil in place. Every year, the climate offered a blend of unpredictable droughts and unpredictable torrents. The wind scoured with clouds of dust and in summer wet the earth. If the earth and the sun touched enough fingertip, food could grow. If not, it could not. Every homesteader lived in anxiety of panic—that is, of the panic that the crops would fail and that the absence of local food supplies would leave his household equally unharvested.

3. Applications and Significance of Barbed Wire Fences

Barbs were invented to convert the open range into “improved pasturage” by defining what grounds domestic grazing and by excusing away hungry creatures unwanted precognition. It was the improved fencing made possible by barbs that facilitated early grading – the holding of a few carcasses from the healthy moving mass that an Indian buffaloes had provided the food fame brought. While their predominant early role was in deflecting rural traffic, not reducing the freedom of the stock to be confined, efficiency in the use of grasses also demanded greater care of the animals enclosed.

The impact of barbed wire on the western prairies has been permanent and profound. Barbed wire was the prime essential of fencing thousands of miles of twisted sod, or cedar pickets, or redwood lumber to define the land unit of American agriculture, the rectangular farm. Its foreign in substantive economic impacts have been more enduring, if less dramatic. Farm organization, value changes, gains in production all spring from the need of a farm family to protect both its stock and its self. From the first applications of barbs to their domestic farm species, the male history of barbed wire has been linked with animals.

4. Environmental and Societal Impacts of Barbed Wire Fences

Even though each individual strand of barbed wire is small and lightweight, the uncountable millions of miles of wire consumed in its manufacture have made it one of the largest man-made alterations to the surface of the earth. The manufacture and use of such tremendous quantities necessarily created strong influences on a wide range of ecological and social factors; barbed wire would not have had such far-reaching impacts had it not been so ubiquitous.

Barbed wire had a tremendous impact on the western half of the United States, being called the most dynamic force in the history of the West. In the broadest view, it is thought that barbed wire advanced the frontier, transforming a mobile and open region into one defined by fences, even though in the short term the spread of barbed wire disrupted the social fabric of the region, temporarily ending the open range, isolating people and resources from the rest of the world. The spread of barbed wire resulted in a rapid increase in patents, the development of entirely new markets for fence tools in the West, and the establishment of new factories to meet the increasing domestic and international consumption of barbed wire.

5. Future Trends and Innovations in Barbed Wire Fences Technology

Today’s state of the art systems involve the use of a closed circuit television camera focused on the fence line. The images are digitized and processed by computers in an attempt to detect and locate human intruders. The computer compares an image background with the fence line image. New intruders are detected as they move along the fence line. They change the background moved by wind or animals. Fence vibration from wind is the most difficult to eliminate. The system detects threats who move parallel to the fence but can be defeated by quickly cutting the fence and entering the secured area. The technology was being developed in three different directions until the Army Researcher’s Office intervened and funded development on a single project.

New technologies are continuing to emerge for the use and application of steel wire in security and containment fencing. As with many other areas, electronic and computer technologies have been a major factor in the various new systems tested or put into use over the past several years. High-security applications with increased personnel and financial resources promoting the development of systems to augment the intrusion detection capabilities of barbed wire fences at a very high level will continue to advance. The primary application of the systems discussed below will continue to be in this heavily funded sector. Increases will be in construction costs. Economics will not make this technology widely applicable.