Some great previous HN discussions on barbed wire telephony:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There are also discussions about networking over barbed wire.

I was really disappointed not to see any mention of Claude Shannon running barbed wire comms in rural Northern Michigan.

This is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.

I couple years ago I read "A Mind at Play", Soni & Goodman, a biography on Claude Shannon. He grew up on a farm and the book mentions how he made extensive use of barbed wire fence telegraph (and if I recall telephone). Perhaps one of the early experiences Shannon had regarding information.

The MIT Museum had a display (last year) of Shannon's "toys", including the famous mouse maze. I don't recall any mention of his early days using barbed wire telegraph though.

If you can get your hands on it, I recommend Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by the same author. She covers barbed wire as well as many other ways to communicate. The book itself is gorgeous.

Needs more modem.

That’s really cool. I wonder if you could run anything else on a fence network. Like some sort of primitive computer network.