On November 24 Joseph F. Glidden of De Kalb, Illinois, received U.S. patent 157,124 for an invention that would be just as important as railroads and the Colt .45 in shaping the West: barbed wire. As the frontier advanced, stockmen and farmers existed side by side, which meant the farmers had to protect their crops from roving animals. Since trees were extremely scarce on the Great Plains, wood fences were too expensive. Plain wire fencing was cheaper, but it could easily be knocked over by a hungry beast. Barbed wire eliminated this problem with sharp attachments that animals learned to avoid.

In 1868 Michael Kelly of New York City patented the first practical design for an armored wire fence. Although he managed to sell a few thousand tons, it was hard to produce and still too costly. Then in 1873 Glidden and his friends Isaac Ellwood and Jacob Haish visited the De Kalb county fair. There they saw an inventor displaying a sixteen-foot strip of wood studded with protruding brads. It was meant to be attached to a wire fence to keep cows away. While effective, the device was too expensive and cumbersome for most farmers. Still, the idea was sound, and all three men began tinkering with ways to incorporate sharp points into a fence itself.

Glidden developed a pattern that he called the Winner. Its main advantage was that its barbs were made of wire instead of metal ribbon (as in Kelly’s product), so it could easily be mass-produced by machine. Haish, who would become Glidden’s bitter rival, patented his own design, known as “S” wire, which embodied the same principle. Meanwhile, inventors across the country continued devising variations of their own.

Glidden and Ellwood went into business together. They had two big advantages over Haish and the others: a partnership with Washburn & Moen, the giant Massachusetts wire manufacturer, and a cleverly worded patent that turned most other barbed-wire inventors, including Haish, into infringers. Litigation dragged on for years, and the Supreme Court did not extinguish the final challenge to Glidden’s patent until 1892, a year after it had expired. In the meantime, sales skyrocketed to more than 170,000 tons a year, and the barbed-wire industry became the equivalent of today’s Internet gold rush.

Anyone who came up with a slight modification of the basic design could receive a patent (as more than four hundred inventors did) or simply go into business without one (like perhaps fifteen hundred others). Washburn S Moen pursued such competitors vigorously, usually either winning suits against them or buying them out. Although Haish’s patent was eventually nullified, he got rich anyway by designing a machine that manufactured barbed wire much more efficiently than the modified coffee grinder Glidden had been using.

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