Barbed Wire Frontiers

In 1873 "Uncle Joe" Glidden, a sixty-year-old farmer in DeKalb, Illinois, became inspired to improve fencing after seeing a thorny rail at a county fair. Taking an old hand-cranked coffee mill, he modified it to coil some wire barbs and strung them on a wire in hopes of keeping his cattle from his cornfield. When the wire became tangled, he discovered what had eluded others for decades: how to make an all-wire barbed fence.

Farmers on the prairie lacked effective, inexpensive fencing, so the appeal of barbed wire was obvious, and a race began to imitate Glidden's invention and secure patents. What followed was a tug-of-war over a transformational technology that shaped America and the world. The ease of manufacturing barbed wire, the high profits it offered, and the growing market induced many to jump into the business, and many styles of barbed wire came onto the market over the next few years. Manufacturers used their patents to stop infringers and protect their own improvements.

With the informed eye of a patent attorney with an engineering background, author Geoffrey A. Mantooth makes the story of this transformational technology easy to understand. In Barbed Wire Frontiers: How a Simple Invention Made a Lot of Money, Mantooth traces the development of a staple of agricultural life, especially in the west. With lively prose and an abundance of informative illustrations, Barbed Wire Frontiers introduces readers to the little-known (and sometimes unknown) characters who helped reshape agriculture in the United States.