50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Hartford

Late in 1876, so the story goes, a young man named John Warn 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. Oh, 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. Nevermind. John Warn Gates, a man who later won the nickname Better Million Gates,

began to take bets with onlookers as to whether these powerful, ornary longhorns could break through

the fragile seaming wire. They couldn't. Even when Gates' sidekick, a Mexican cowboy,

charged at the cattle howling, Spanish curses and waving a burning brand in each hand, the wire held.

Better Million 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 Decalbe Illinois.

John Warn 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 barb is twisted around a strand of smooth wire, then a second strand of smooth

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