There are more than 700 steel knots in The “Bobbed Wire” Bible ... the U.S. Patent Office processed more than 200 different patents for various types of “spiked fencing” between 1867 ...

Listen to an episode of American Countryside with Andrew McCrea: In 1874, Joseph Glidden, a banker, businessman and a farmer, designed and patented a type of wire fencing known as barbed wire.

And shortly thereafter, Europe would also be covered in it, but in a very different context. In World War I, barbed wire would become infamous in trench warfare; in World War II, it became the ...