Barbed wire began with a county-fair display and a coffee mill
At a DeKalb, Illinois, fair in 1873, a farmer named Joseph Glidden saw a wooden strip studded with metal points meant to stop cows. He went home, made barbs with his coffee mill, twisted wires together on a grindstone, and patented the result. Within decades nearly all of the open range was fenced.
The idea had been circling for years. A Frenchman, Léonce Eugène Grassin-Baledans, proposed a fence of thin, bristling wire in 1860, Louis François Janin patented a double wire with diamond-shaped barbs in 1865, and six barbed-wire patents were issued in the United States in 1867 alone, including one to Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio, often called the inventor. The need was obvious on the Great Plains, where timber and stone were costly and hedges struggled in dry, rocky soil. Farmers near Fresno spent nearly $4,000 in 1872 on wooden fencing for 2,500 acres of wheat.
Glidden's version, known as The Winner, was delayed when the lumber merchant Jacob Haish, who held rival patents, accused him of interference; it was finally approved on November 24, 1874. Glidden and the hardware dealer Isaac Ellwood built a factory in DeKalb, and the eastern wire maker Washburn & Moen bought Glidden out. As many as 150 companies were making the wire between 1873 and 1899, until an 1880 court ruling, later upheld by the Supreme Court in 1892, confirmed Glidden's patent and consolidation followed into the American Steel and Wire Company, eventually part of U.S. Steel.
Texans were wary until the salesman John Warne Gates penned cattle behind wire in San Antonio's Military Plaza in 1876, after which orders poured in. Gates later fell out with his partners and ran the largest maker of unlicensed bootleg wire before taking over Washburn & Moen in 1898.
Fences reshaped the West. Ranchers in the Texas Panhandle strung wire to block cattle drifting south from northern blizzards, and in the winter of 1885 some herds lost up to three-quarters of their animals against those lines. Smaller cattlemen cut fences in protest until Texas made fence cutting a felony in 1884. With fewer strays to chase, far fewer cowboys were needed, and some historians date the end of the Old West to the spread of barbed wire.
Source: Barbed wire
