ABSTRACT
Invented and patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, an immediate success in mass production by 1876, barbed wire, first of iron and then steel, did much to transform the American West, before doing the same in other prairie lands from Argentina to Australia. Actually, cheap fencing transformed the primordial business of cattle-raising itself. Barbed wire is important in author's life and the story of how it was so quickly produced by automatic machines on the largest scale, efficiently distributed to customers necessarily remote from urban centers, marketed globally almost immediately, and finally used to change landscapes and societies, is certainly very interesting. He writes that barbed wire outranks the machine gun in stopping power, evidently not knowing that infantry can walk over any amount of barbed wire if it is not over-watched by adequate covering fires, and need not waste time cutting through the wires one by one.
