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wire. The double-stranded structure, as well as the coil of the barb itself, would keep the barb in place. In short, unlike previous inventors, and emboldened by Rose’s idea, Glidden decided to make the barb fixed so as to resist the cow in its approach and to inflict real pain. Further, Glidden’s main technical idea—stranding two wires and a series of barbs between them—came from the experience of stranding wires together to form ropes, where the crucial fact was that machines already existed for the operation. No special new ingenuity was required: standard practices could be extended to achieve the mass production of barbed wire. And this is how barbed wire was born. In a sense, it was a natural idea, the confluence of all that went into the West: violence and the need to control space, iron, mass production. At any rate, a number of visitors to Rose’s exhibition at De Kalb went away with the idea of attaching barbs to iron fences instead of wooden boards. Glidden’s original patent was quickly joined, apparently independently, by five other barbed wire patents, and most began production almost immediately.³³ Already in 1876, half the rights in one of the main patents were bought by Washburn and Moen, a Massachusetts-based iron and steel company, and in this way barbed wire reached the mainstream of manufacturing industry.³⁴ It was an extension of existing technologies, and so, although it had been invented on the prairie, it was soon taken up by the mass producers of steel and iron.

      Washburn and Moen knew what they were doing. Barbed wire was an instant success. In the spring of 1875, the first commercial leaflet produced by the fledgling Glidden company claimed that the fence had been tested already by more than a thousand farmers—hardly a hyperbole, as the statistics available from later in the decade would indicate. Some of the selling points Glidden made were especially interesting:

      It is the cheapest and most durable fence made.

      It takes less posts than any other fence.

      It can be put for _ the labor of any other fence.

      Cattle, mule and horses will not rub against and break it down.

      The wind has no effect upon it and prairie fires will not burn it up.

      Stock will not jump over or crawl through it.

      Two major claims emerge. First, the technology had the advantage of violence, so that it more effectively protected the space it enclosed. Indeed, not only was it a kind of fence that protected the inside it surrounded—but the fence protected itself as well. Second, the technology had the advantage of iron. The material was more resistant to natural forces. Combining the two, the power of violence and the power of iron, led to the major advantage of the technology at that stage. Lighter materials were required now to construct a fence, hence less labor, hence ultimately the fence’s competitive pricing.³⁵

      Here is how Washburn and Moen were to state the case in 1880, in one of their early pamphlets. Taking forty rods of three-row fences as the unit of comparison (about one hundred meters of fenced length), we have the following:

WOODEN BOARD FENCE	BARBED WIRE FENCE
1,000 feet pine fencing	15.00	136 lbs barbed wire	14.96
80 posts	16.00	40 posts	8.00
15 lbs nails	.60	2 lbs staples	.20
Labor	2.50	Labor	.50
Total	34.10	Total	23.6636

      The beauty of this pricing scheme is obvious: the main component, the one on which Washburn and Moen make a profit—barbed wire itself—is priced artificially high, just below the price of the main alternative piece of hardware, pine. The entire barbed wire fence is made competitive only because barbed wire, especially owing to its lightness, is cheaper to erect: fewer posts and nails are required, and much less labor. Notice, however, that posts are required—and were usually made of wood. This is an important aspect concerning the growth of barbed wire: it did not replace wood. That is, barbed wire did not at all result in a reduction of the importation of wood to the West. It did not, after all, replace existing wooden fences: instead, barbed wire fences were erected where no fences had been erected before (and none, probably, would have been erected otherwise). Thus barbed wire actually led to a growth in demand for timber. As the West was becoming capital intensive, the North was being deforested.³⁷ Barbed wire represents therefore not the replacement of wood by iron but rather a more effective combination of the two. It uses wood for its capability to sustain weight, and iron for its capability to take on precise, strong forms. In this, barbed wire resembles the two other typical technologies of the period, the railroad and the telegraph line, all consisting of repeated bases of wood, set perpendicularly to support long lines of custom-made metals. (The telegraph, another huge wire-based industry, used copper rather than iron.) Short posts of wood, repeated at regular intervals, supply these objects with a solid hold on the surface of the Earth; metal lines, attached continuously, make them stretch without a hitch to an indefinite length. In combination, such objects can accomplish a task, defined along immensely long lines, and in this way they reshape space—railroads and telegraph lines by connecting distant points, and barbed wire by defining lines of limit. This is the material context in which the growth of barbed wire should be placed.

      The spread of such lines determines the transformation of space. From 9,000 miles to 30,000 miles of tracks: this was the growth of the American railroad during the 1850s, the period during which northeastern America was forever reshaped by train.³⁸ By 1880—a mere six years after its first patents—something like 50,000 miles of length were fenced by barbed wire.³⁹ We are therefore justified in comparing the revolution of barbed wire with the revolution of railroads; both transformed space almost instantaneously. The difference lies in the intended species—and is also the difference between lines as connectors and lines as dividers. While the purpose of trains was to make motion possible, for humans (as well as for their commodities), the purpose of barbed wire was to prevent motion, for animals.

      The key to the entire success of this technology was, of course, its ability to stop cows. We have looked at how manufacturers priced (or at least attempted to price) their barbed wire, but whereas prices could be fixed on paper, animals had to be stopped in the real world, and humans had to be shown that. This was indeed the marketing strategy employed by the distributors of barbed wire. Let us look at an event that acquired an emblematic significance in the literature on barbed wire: the exhibition in San Antonio in 1876. Three years earlier, the farmer Henry Rose had displayed the fruit of his farm experiment on his cow. Now the salesman John Gates offered a far more striking spectacle. (Gates, at this point, was a mere agent for barbed wire manufacturers, but

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