Barb Wire Telephone Lines

ReadyMom wrote:    Has anyone ever heard of this before??

Atrocious but efficient: How ranchers used barbed wire to make phone calls
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/atrocious-but-efficient-how-ranchers-used-barbed-wire-to-make-phone-calls/

In the article, they only halfway say that the atrocious part was the sound quality.

I don't really recall hearing about the system used in the article, but 20 years later, the same system was used in WW1 to communicate along the trenches. A grounding stake was driven at each phone, and a single wire ran along the face of the fence. Allowed decent voice communication for a few miles.

It also gave rise to the first listening device. The induction currents from a couple miles of wire, carrying a fairly strong audio signal could be listened to, by running a wire parallel to it, in the trench of the opposing army.

The fix was to use two wires, a system that saw a lot of use until the end of the 20th century.

ReadyMom wrote:

TRex2 wrote:In the article, they only halfway say that the atrocious part was the sound quality.

I did notice the mention of poor sound quality. I guess if you have nothing then 'something' will do.

Yep. I was a communications guy in the AF, and in the early 80's I saw a lot of people putting up with some pretty lousy radios (left over from the end of Vietnam), since the replacements were a few years away.