Who invented barbed wire and in what year

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. Until it 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 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 barbed wire could enforce legal boundaries, many fences were illegal - attempts to commandeer common land for private purposes. As the wire's dominion spread, fights started to break out.

In the "fence-cutting wars", masked gangs such as the Blue Devils and the Javelinas cut the wires and left dire threats warning fence-owners not to rebuild. There were shootouts and some deaths. Eventually, the authorities clamped down. The fence-cutting wars ended, The barbed wire remained. And if the cowboys were outraged, the Native Americans suffered much more. 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. 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 - 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, an 18th Century philosopher from Geneva who protested against the evils of enclosure. In his Discourse on Inequality, he lamented "the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him.

But it's certainly true that modern economies are built on the legal fact that most things - including land and property - have an owner, usually a person or a corporation. The ability to own private property also 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 the Indian city of Kolkata Calcutta , or even a piece of intellectual property such as the rights to Mickey Mouse.

The warrior monks who invented banking. He established the Barb Fence Company to manufacture his wire; it was an immediate success. Glidden was born in Charlestown, New Hampshire. His wire has outlasted other innovative wires used for enclosure throughout the twentieth century, and it is still used today. Induction Event Collegiate Inventors Event. Back to Inductee Search Joseph F. Glidden Barbed Wire. Roosevelt was home-schooled and then attended Harvard University, graduating in He served in the New York state legislature from to In , Roosevelt married Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.

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