SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_01: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_03: Late in 1876, so the story goes, a young man named John Warren Gates built a wire fence pen in the military plaza in the middle of San Antonio, Texas. He rounded up some of the toughest and wildest Longhorns in all of Texas. That's how he described them. Others say that the cattle were a docile bunch. And there are those who wonder whether this particular story is true at all. But never mind. John Warren Gates, a man who later won the nickname Betamillion Gates, began to take bets with onlookers as to whether these powerful ornery Longhorns could break through the fragile-seeming wire. They couldn't. Even when Gates's sidekick, a Mexican cowboy, charged at the cattle, howling Spanish curses and waving a burning brand in each hand, the wire held. Betamillion Gates wasn't so worried about winning his wages. He had a bigger game to play. He was selling a new kind of fence. And the orders soon came rolling in. The advertisements of the time touted this fence as the greatest discovery of the age, patented by J.F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois. John Warren Gates described it more poetically. Lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust. We simply call it barbed wire. To call barbed wire the greatest discovery of the age might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that the advertisers didn't know that Alexander Graham Bell was just about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But while modern minds naturally think of the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wreaked huge changes on the American West and much more quickly. Joseph Glidden's design for barbed wire wasn't the first, but it was the best. The design is recognizably modern, the same as the barbed wire you can see around farmland today. The wicked bar is twisted around a strand of smooth wire. Then a second strand of smooth wire is twisted together with the first to stop the barbs from sliding around. Farmers snapped it up. There was a reason that American farmers were so hungry for barbed wire. A few years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act of 1862. The act specified that any honest citizen, including women and freed slaves, could lay claim to up to 160 acres of land in America's western territories. All they had to do was build a home there and work the land for five years. It sounds simple, but the prairie was a vast and uncharted expanse of tall, tough grasses, a land suitable for nomads, not settlers. It had long been the territory of the Native Americans. After Europeans arrived and pushed west, the cowboys roamed free, herding cattle over the boundless plains. But settlers needed fences, not least to keep those free-roaming cattle from trampling their crops. And there wasn't a lot of wood, certainly none to spare for fencing in mile after mile of what was often called the American desert. Farmers tried growing thorn bush hedges, but they were slow growing and inflexible. Smooth wire fences didn't work either. The cattle simply pushed through them. The lack of fencing was much lamented. That was the problem and barbed wire was the solution. The wire changed what the Homestead Act couldn't. Until barbed wire was developed, the prairie was an unbounded space, more like an ocean than a stretch of arable land. Private ownership of land wasn't common because it wasn't feasible. The barbed wire spread because it solved one of the biggest problems that the settlers faced. But it also sparked ferocious disagreements and it's not hard to see why. The homesteading farmers were trying to stake out their property, property that had once been the territory of various Native American tribes. No wonder those tribes called barbed wire the devil's rope. The old-time cowboys also lived on the principle that cattle could graze freely across the plains. This was the law of the open range. The cowboys hated the wire. Cattle would get nasty wounds and infections. When the blizzards came, the cattle would try to head south. Sometimes they got stuck against the wire and died in their thousands. Other cowmen adopted barbed wire, using it to fence off private ranches. And while the attraction of the barbed wire was that it could enforce legal boundaries, many of the fences were illegal too. Attempts to commandeer common land for private purposes. When the barbed wire fences went up across the west, fights started to break out. In the fence cutting wars, masked gangs with names such as the Blue Devils and the Javelinas cut the wires and left death threats warning the fence owner not to rebuild. There were shootouts, even a few deaths. These ferocious arguments on the frontier were reflected in a philosophical debate. The English 17th century philosopher John Locke, a great influence on the founding fathers of the United States, puzzled over the problem of how anybody might legally come to own land. Once upon a time, nobody owned anything. But Locke argued that we all own our own labour. And if you mix your labour with the land that nature provides, for example by ploughing the soil, well then you've blended something you definitely own with something that nobody owns. By working the land, you've come to own it. Nonsense, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, an 18th century French philosopher, protested the evils of enclosure. In his discourse on inequality, he lamented, the first man who, having enclosed a
SPEAKER_02: piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him. This man, said Rousseau, was the real founder of civil society. Rousseau didn't intend that as a
SPEAKER_03: compliment. But complimentary or not, it's true that modern economies are built on private property, on the legal fact that most things have an owner, usually a person or a corporation. Modern economies are also built on the idea that private property is a good thing, because private property gives people an incentive to invest in and improve what they own. Whether that's a patch of land in the American Midwest, or an apartment in Kolkata, or even a piece of intellectual property such as the rights to Mickey Mouse. It's a powerful argument, and it was ruthlessly and cynically deployed by those who wanted to claim that Native Americans didn't really have a right to their own territory, because they weren't actively developing it in the style that Europeans saw fit. So the story of how barbed wire changed the West is also the story of how property rights changed the world. And it's the story of how, even in a sophisticated economy, what the law says sometimes matters less than simple practicality. The 1862 Homestead Act laid out the rules on who owned what in the western territories, but those rules didn't mean much before they were reinforced by barbed wire. Meanwhile, the barbed wire barons, Better Million Gates, Joseph Glidden and several others, they became rich. The year that Glidden secured his barbed wire patent, 50 kilometres of wire were produced. Six years later, in 1880, the factory in DeKalb turned out over 420,000 kilometres of wire, enough to circle the world 10 times over. The story of barbed wire was well told in Alan Krell's book, The Devil's Rope,
SPEAKER_01: a cultural history of barbed wire. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things. Here's another podcast from the BBC World Service
SPEAKER_03: that you might like. It's a personal favourite of mine. More or less, Behind the Stats. This is your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and you know, sometimes I even present it. Check it out.
