This is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.
The phone batteries weren't a high load kind of affair. They merely needed to change the varying resistance of the carbon microphone into an audio voltage - on the order of milliwatts of power - to send down the line. A more modern phone, still using a carbon microphone but powered by the line, needed about 20mA of loop current to do this. The telephone terms for the old system vs. the newer is "local" vs. "common" battery.
Heavy duty batteries - specifically the "A" batteries that powered the vacuum tube heaters in early radios - were made rechargeable to save cost.
My grandmother from rural Saskatchewan said that back then they would exchange their radio batteries when they went to town.
Her husband, my grandfather, lived in Regina but worked on a traveling threshing crew and mentioned seeing a windmill driving an old generator from a car to charge batteries at one stop.
I couple years ago I read "A Mind at Play", Soni & Goodman, a biography on Claude Shannon. He grew up on a farm and the book mentions how he made extensive use of barbed wire fence telegraph (and if I recall telephone). Perhaps one of the early experiences Shannon had regarding information.
The MIT Museum had a display (last year) of Shannon's "toys", including the famous mouse maze. I don't recall any mention of his early days using barbed wire telegraph though.
> How does the electric fence gate lead to transistors?
> [ Relay, Electric gate, Flip-flop (electronics) ]
/? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
> /? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
Who is meant to be doing the finding, in this case?
If you can get your hands on it, I recommend Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by the same author. She covers barbed wire as well as many other ways to communicate. The book itself is gorgeous.
When I was a kid, I scavenged a hunk of cable "Ma Bell" had left behind. I spliced together a quarter mile pair of wires to connect the neighbors house to mine and hooked up a battery and microphone on one side, and a speaker on the other. No luck. Then we connected the "speaker side" to the input of my friends stereo, and it was possible to be heard. I was about 10 at that time ( ~1970) and was not very aware of voltage drop. The taps and recording system I put in our basement worked much better!
If you look in vintage Sears catalogs - easily found online - I have a printed copy somewhere of the 1908 one and it's definitely in there - aftermarket phones had a bit of a "contraband" aspect to them, and were offered to be shipped in unmarked boxes. Not all local phone companies were "friendly" to people stringing up their own lines.
>Anecdotally, fence phones were still being used throughout the 1970s and perhaps even later. C.F. Eckhardt describes calling his parents who lived in rural Texas and still used a fence phone; their number was simply 37, designated on the small local network by three long rings and one short ring.
Is this perhaps an OCR or typography error? If the number were "31" that would make much more sense to encode as three long one short. A stylized 1 can look a bit like a 7 depending on how the characters are drawn.
I talked with someone years ago who did networking deep in third world countries in the 90s and early 00’s. Hey said they would not-infrequently use wire fences for wiring up remote locations using X.25 because the protocol was highly tolerant of very noisy lines, and it was the only way to have any confidence the infrastructure wouldn’t just be ripped out the day after they left.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadhttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There are also discussions about networking over barbed wire.
Dry-cell batteries had to be changed, they weren't recharged.
https://www.reddit.com/r/diyelectronics/comments/y7qmhq/15v_...
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube_battery
[1] - https://www.wincharger.com/
Heavy duty batteries - specifically the "A" batteries that powered the vacuum tube heaters in early radios - were made rechargeable to save cost.
Her husband, my grandfather, lived in Regina but worked on a traveling threshing crew and mentioned seeing a windmill driving an old generator from a car to charge batteries at one stop.
The MIT Museum had a display (last year) of Shannon's "toys", including the famous mouse maze. I don't recall any mention of his early days using barbed wire telegraph though.
"Who invented the transistor?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449618 :
> Who invented the electric fence gate?
> How does the electric fence gate lead to transistors?
> [ Relay, Electric gate, Flip-flop (electronics) ]
/? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
Who is meant to be doing the finding, in this case?
The most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history
Likely from the largest coronal mass ejection in modern human history
The natural EMP effect was so powerful, telegraph operators were able to completely disconnect all their batteries and still communicate for hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event#Telegraphs
Imagine some future event even more powerful and our dependence on all those LEO sats...
Is this perhaps an OCR or typography error? If the number were "31" that would make much more sense to encode as three long one short. A stylized 1 can look a bit like a 7 depending on how the characters are drawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_iuE_L2wys