Joseph F. Glidden and the Contentious Invention of Barbed Wire

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I don't know
how this subject got on my list. Okay, it's been
there for a while, and it's one of those things

(00:23):
I keep. We both have talked about keeping lists. I'm
real bad about having two lists going because one is
on my phone and one is handwritten. Yeah, And I
was looking at the one on my phone and I
have scrolled past Joseph Glidden's name many times and then
I was like, wait, what did he do? And I
looked it back up, and I'm like, oh, yeah, we
should talk about him. Yeah, because this is a good

(00:45):
story of how a commonplace item in our world came
to be. It's also an item that's had a lot
of influence. It's a story with a contentious and lengthy
legal battle, but the good news is overall this is
a pretty upbeat one. Like the ending of that legal
battle doesn't, of course play out to everyone's delight, but
there seems to be a pretty good day New Mont.

(01:07):
So I thought it would be a good day to
talk about Joseph Glidden and the invention of barbed wire.
So Joseph Glidden was born on January eighteenth, eighteen thirteen,
in Charlestown, New Hampshire. His parents were David and Polly
Heard Glidden, and David was a farmer. Eventually the family

(01:27):
moved to Orleans County, New York. Joseph at that point
was still a baby this is west of Rochester. As
a boy, he did go to school, although once Joseph
got to his teenage years, he only went for part
of the year so that he would be available for
farm work the rest of the time. Yeah, basically he
was a winter semester only student at that point, and

(01:50):
when he got older he attended Middlebury Academy in what
is now Wyoming County, New York, and then he went
on to Lema, New York for seminary. Joseph his first
career was teaching, and that was something he did for
several years. But sometime after eighteen thirty four, so when
he was still in his early twenties, he decided to
move back to Orleans County, New York and start working

(02:13):
for his father on the family farm. And he stayed
there doing that for the better part of a decade.
I have seen accounts that say he was there eight
years and some that mentioned nine. Unclear when he arrived,
so it's hard to say which of those is accurate.
But at the age of twenty four, Gliddon married a
woman named Clarissa Foster, and over the course of a
few years, Joseph and Clarissa had two sons together, Virgil

(02:37):
and Homer. In eighteen forty two, as Joseph was approaching thirty,
he decided to set out on his own again, although
his brother Josiah was with him. The two of them
traveled west from New York with two threshing machines, and
they picked up work as they went. After several months
of travel, they landed in Dacab County, Illinois. There the

(02:59):
cannect did with their cousin Russell Huntley. Huntley had some
land to sell, and Joseph was interested. He bought six
hundred acres from his cousin, and he envisioned that he
and Clarissa could be raising a family there. Clarissa had
stayed behind in New York while Joseph had sought out
the place they would settle, and in eighteen forty three,

(03:21):
she joined her husband in Illinois, and while this should
have been the start of a really happy time in
their lives, tragedy soon struck. Clarissa and Joseph had a
third child in the summer of eighteen forty six, but
Clarissa died in childbirth. The daughter that she had delivered
was also named Clarissa, just to make things a little
bit confusing, but little Clarissa's life was pretty short. According

(03:44):
to some accounts, all three of Joseph's children died in
an epidemic, and if that was the case, it seems
like the most likely culprit would have been cholera, which
hit Illinois quite hard in the late eighteen forties. Joseph
remarried to a woman named Lucinda Worn on October sixth,
eighteen fifty. Lucenda was born in eighteen twenty six in

(04:05):
Mount Pleasant, New Jersey. Her family had moved to Illinois
in eighteen thirty seven and opened a tavern called the
Halfway House, which also served as the post office of Elburn, Illinois,
where the family lived. That was with Lucenda's father, Henry Warren,
as postmaster. In December of eighteen fifty one, a little

(04:25):
Over a year after the wedding, Joseph and Lucenda welcomed
a daughter named Elva Francis. At this point, there was
a Decab county in Illinois, but no incorporated city, although
there were certainly hopes on the parts of the people
that lived there that the area would grow and eventually
have a more centralized presence. Joseph became very involved in

(04:47):
his community, and in eighteen fifty two he ran for
county sheriff and won. He also helped the railroad out
when the Galena and Chicago Union Line wanted to build. Joseph,
seeing this as an op opportunity to continue to grow
the area, let them cross the railroad through his property
at its southern end, and he and Lucinda allegedly greeted

(05:08):
the first train crew that came through once the line
was complete, and even served them breakfast in their home.
The city of Dacab incorporated as a village four years
after Glidden's election to the office of sheriff, and it
was another two decades after that before it became a city,
But through it all Glidden was a leader within the community.

(05:29):
After serving as sheriff, he was on the county's Board
of Supervisors, and in eighteen sixty one Glidden built a
new home, upgrading from the log cabin he and Lucinda
and Elva had lived in for years. This is a
tiny detail, but we're noting it because it's something we're
going to come back to. In eighteen seventy three, it's
reported that Glidden saw a type of barbed fencing at

(05:52):
the DCAB County Fair. The version on display had been
created by another farmer, Henry Rose, and it featured metal
bar herbs that were embedded in flat wooden blocks. The
details on this are different per different people's accounts, but
basically some of them say it's they're square blocks about
two inches square, with a sharp end sticking out of

(06:13):
each wooden block. Some of them describe them more as
longer slats, but either way, these small pieces of wood
were then attached to wire that was strung between posts,
and this was all designed to keep cattle from leaning
up against the fence and toppling it. It was a
good idea, but Glidden thought he could improve upon it,
and just as a brief aside. According to a Tulsa

(06:35):
World right up from nineteen fifty two, so long after
this all happened. Glidden was partially inspired by having heard
about cactus fences in the Southwest, and he wanted to
incorporate that idea into what he might do with a
fence like this. It's completely unclear where that detail came
from or if it has any kernel of truth to it,
but I just thought it was interesting. The main issues

(07:00):
that Glidden saw with the wooden barbed fence were that
it was costly, timber was not exactly abundant in the
Plaine States, and also it wasn't all that sturdy. So
he started thinking about ways to develop something that had
the same benefit of keeping the cattle from it, but
addressed those two weaknesses in the design. One of the

(07:22):
first things he recognized was that the barbs which stuck
out of the wood in roses design, would be more
effective if they were attached directly to the wire. According
to Lare, which is based on an account that Glidden's wife, Lucinda,
gave many years later, she started noticing that her hairpins
were going missing, and then she initially thought it was

(07:45):
their daughter stealing them, but then one day she saw
her husband just casually pull one from his pocket. When
she asked what he was doing. He told her that
he was using them to figure out his fence design,
so he started working with fencewayer once he had this
design idea, which was to twist small, sharpened lengths of
wire into coils that could then be strung on two

(08:07):
longer lengths of wire to create fencing. Forming those coils
was a challenge though. If you've ever tried to coil
a piece of thick wire in a uniform way, even
with players, you know that could be tricky. He ended
up getting a blacksmith friend named Phineas Vaughn involved, and

(08:27):
Phineas helped figure out an easy way to produce these
small coiled barbs in quantity, and so Glinton applied for
and received a patent for his wire on May twelfth
of eighteen seventy four. But though his coiled barbs were effective,
another problem presented itself. The coils could be strung onto

(08:50):
longer lengths of wire pretty easily, but then keeping them
in place that was another matter. Imagining just all the
little barbs widing and collecting in one point on the wire.
But at some point Glidden hit upon the idea of
twisting the wire so there would be the wire that
had the barbs strung onto it twisted along with the

(09:13):
other wire, and those two wires together would keep the
barbs in place. He started working on another patent application.
His next patent was issued on November twenty fourth, eighteen
seventy four. It was patent number one five seven one
two four for the type of barbed wire that Gliden
called the winner. The following month, he and Phineas Vaughan

(09:35):
received a patent for the machinery they had developed to
produce this wire. In the first gear that Glidden held
this patent, he produced thirty two miles or fifty one
kilometers worth of barbed wire. His initial method of manufacturer
used a horse to drive the twisting machinery. That might
sound odd to today's ear, but that's like That's also

(09:58):
how rope was produced, not a brand new idea. He
eventually entered into a partnership with hardware store owner Isaac L.
Elwood to create manufacturing facilities. Elwood had been working on
his own barbed wire design and even filed a patent
for it, but once they were business partners, he backed
Glidden's coil and double wire design. Coming up, we'll talk

(10:22):
about some of the ways that Joseph Glidden marketed his invention.
But first we'll pause for a quick sponsor break. Joseph
Glidden had very wisely recognized that he couldn't sell his

(10:43):
wire fencing across the country himself, so he created a
sales network basically where he had been. He showed it
to his neighbors and they got the idea that it
was a good thing, so they started buying it, and
he thought he could replicate that in other communities, So
he hired men from within the communities he wanted to
sell to, and he had them act as his agents

(11:04):
in that area, with each agent kind of having their
own territory. This localized distribution gained the interest and trust
of a lot of farmers, and sales really started to
take off. By eighteen eighty, for example, the facility was
making two hundred and sixty three thousand miles it's about
four hundred twenty three thousand kilometers of Glidden wire every year.

(11:26):
Another way that Glidden expanded his reach was to build
an example of how well the fencing worked. In eighteen
eighty one, he invested in land in Grayson County, Texas,
in a partnership with Henry B. Sanborn, who already owned
two thousand acres there, and the reason for this was
that while Texas had a large number of ranchers, it

(11:47):
had been slow to embrace barbed wire. For one, people
saw it as a Yankee invention and therefore suspicious. For another,
Texas was mostly run with an open range cattle driving method,
so all the cattle would be out in the range
and then driven back to another place at the right
time of the year. There were also concerns that the

(12:08):
barbed wire would kill more cattle than it could contain,
so the Glidden and Sanborn project was meant to give
ranchers an example of just how beneficial barbed fencing could be.
Glidden and Sanborn had the property fenced off with barbed
wire and they named it Frying Pan Ranch. Sanborn incidentally

(12:29):
was married to Glidden's niece. Glidden and Sanborn had fifteen
thousand head of cattle brought to the ranch to show
how large an operation they were able to manage thanks
to the use of Glidden's fencing, and it really worked.
The Texas market caught on and boomed as ranchers sought
to duplicate the success of the frying pan ranch setup.

(12:50):
Glidden and his competitors probably did not anticipate the impact
of barbed wire on the shaping of the United States.
This was at a time when the Homestead Act was
enabling people to lay claim to land in the North
American West. That land, of course, was already home to
indigenous people. We have previous episodes where we've talked about

(13:13):
this Act and how it came to be. Barbed Wire
gave homesteaders a way to clearly delineate their claimed land,
but it also obviously disrupted traveling and the grazing practices
of livestock. This so this is affecting both indigenous people
and ranchers who were accustomed to letting livestock just move

(13:35):
through the land unhindered. This also gave homesteaders the confidence
to claim that indigenous tribes were not developing the land
and thus had no right to it. So we would
have like a rancher who had fenced off their land
saying that the Native American people nearby had not developed

(13:55):
their land. This obviously was a faulty notion, rooted in
the idea that white homesteaders knew better about the land
than the peoples who had lived there for generations. The
fencing also impacted wildlife, which could easily get caught in
it and be injured or die. He already mentioned disrupting

(14:16):
animal migrations. Yeah, there's a lot all of those issues,
though didn't really directly impact Glidden. But he had his
own legal battles to fight regarding his patent. He had
a challenge to his claim that he had invented barbed wire.
To be clear, he was certainly not the first person

(14:36):
to think of it. That's obvious by the fact that
he was inspired by Henry Rose's barbed fence idea at
the Decab County Fair, and he wasn't even the first
person to patent it. Rose had a patent, so did
a man named Michael Kelly of New York, who had
an eighteen sixty eight patent for a fence that included
a flatwire almost like a ribbon, that had barbs inserted

(14:57):
through holes in it. He called that thorny fence, and
there had also been a lot of other patent applications
filed for fences with some sort of thorn or barbed attached,
literally dozens of them. But the main challenger to Gliddon's
claim of invention was a man who had been to
the very same county fair, that was Jacob Hash. In fact,

(15:18):
according to Isaac Elwood, these men, along with himself, had
looked at Rosa's barbed fence together. He recalled many years later, quote,
in eighteen seventy three, we had a little county fair
down here where the normal school now stands, and a
man by the name of Rose, that lived in Clinton,
exhibited at that fair a strip of wood about an

(15:40):
inch square and about sixteen feet long, and drove into
his wood some sharp brads, leaving the points sticking out,
for the purpose of hanging it on a smooth wire,
which was the principal fencing material at that time. This
strip of wood, so armed to hang on the wire
was to stop the cattle from crawling through t Mister Glidden,

(16:01):
mister Hash, and myself were at that fair, and all
three of us stood looking at this invention of mister Rose's,
and I think that each one of us at that
hour conceived the idea that barbes could be placed on
the wire in some way instead of being driven into
the strip of wood. Mister Glidden, mister Hash, and myself

(16:22):
each one returned to our places of business with an
idea of constructing a barb wire. Mister Hash made what
is known as the Hash barb and mister Glidden what
is known as the Glidden barb. So Glidden and Hash
obviously knew each other. They lived in a very tiny
town with fewer than sixteen hundred people, and Hash, who

(16:44):
was a carpenter, had actually been the contractor who built
Glidden's house in eighteen sixty one that we mentioned earlier.
They clearly had a relationship. Jacob Hash was born in
Germany in eighteen twenty six, and then his family had
moved to the US and settled in Ohio when Jacob
was still a boy. He moved to Illinois at the
age of nineteen and then to Decab, Illinois, specifically several

(17:07):
years later in eighteen fifty three. Hayesh had learned carpentry
from his father growing up, and he had set up
his own carpentry business into Cab. The timelines of Glidden's
and Hash's work on barbed wire fencing were very parallel. Hash,
according to his own account, had come up with his
version in September of eighteen seventy three, but didn't file

(17:29):
for a patent on it until December, about a month
after Glidden received his patent. Hash's barb is different from Glidden's,
so where Glidden opted for a coiled barb, Hash's was
shaped into an exaggerated sort of sharp s curve. Hash
also had two twisted wires to keep his in place,

(17:49):
and those wires nested into the interior curves on the
s on either side to keep the barbs in place. Now,
there is some inconsistency in accounts about how things played
out from here in terms of how these two men
got along. For example, there's an account by Hayes where
he's like, we got along fine until eighteen seventy six.

(18:09):
But on June twenty fifth of eighteen seventy four, Hash,
after receiving his patent, filed an article of infringement to
stop Glidden's patent rights, and this catalyzed a legal tangle
that played out over the course of eighteen years. Joseph
Glidden managed to largely stay out of the legal fray

(18:30):
because by the spring of eighteen seventy six, so just
a couple of years from the time he applied for
his very first patent, he decided he didn't want to
be part of the manufacture of his barbed wire anymore.
He sold his half of the Glidden Ellwood Wire Company
to Washburn Mowen Company for sixty thousand dollars, but he
kept royalty rights for the wire, and that kept money

(18:52):
flowing in. And you may recall that just a little
while ago we talked about him starting his ranch in
Texas in the early eighteen eighties, which we have been
after this, and that's because even though he wasn't an
owner in the production company anymore, he still had a
very keen interest in the success of his invention because
those royalties were making him a lot of money. As

(19:12):
the legal battle was heating up, a short book appeared
titled The Utility, Efficiency and Economy of barb Fence. A
Book for the Farmer, the gardener, and the country Gentleman.
This seventy four page booklet, which came out in eighteen
seventy six, was published by Washburn and Mowen Manufacturing Company

(19:33):
and Illwood and Company. This booklet is clearly intended to
establish the narrative that Washburn, Mowen and Elwood are the
rightful producers of barbed wire. It opens by noting that
Washburn and Mowen Company had been selling plane wire fences
for more than twenty five years, but that for all
their benefits, cost effectiveness and fire resistance, there were flaws

(19:58):
and it thus the need for barb wire. The booklet
calls out the invention work of William D. Hunt, Michael Kelly,
and Joseph Glindon, and then notes that their business now
owns all of those patents. There are even illustrations, one
of which shows several cattle outside of an enclosed crop,
with the caption quote, barb fence protects the most tempting

(20:22):
crops from the most unruly cattle. I love the phrase
unruly cattle. Yeah, it's a little far side. It makes
me conjure images of like rebellious cows. This book is
also part sales device. It outlines the various costs and
the rates and usage cases for barbed wire, but there
is also an entire section called patent claims, and it

(20:45):
opens this way quote, we briefly enumerate the features of
barb fence and barbs The two companies named regard themselves
as exclusively entitled to manufacture, and then this section lists
all of the various patents they hold with the specific
language of the patents that sets them apart from previous inventions,
and then the rest of the book is filled with

(21:06):
testimonials from happy customers. So this entire thing is very
obviously a PR publication. In a moment, we'll talk more
about the legal conflict over the patent rights to produce
barbed wire, but first we'll hear from the sponsors that
keep stuff you missed in history class going. Unsurprisingly, given

(21:35):
the booklet that we mentioned just before the break, the
Washburn and Mowen Company and Isaac Elwood went all in
on the legal battle over patent rights. In the fall
of eighteen seventy six. They sued Hash, and their efforts
were sweeping, invoking multiple other patents that they had acquired
cutting deals that gave their original patent holders a share

(21:57):
of sales. According to a write up in the chaoz
Ayago Tribune, the bill filed by Glidden's colleagues was to
quote restrain him from him being Hash was to quote
restrain him from infringing a patent for new and useful
improvement in weier fences, issued July twenty third, eighteen sixty
seven to William Hunt reissued March seventh, eighteen seventy six,

(22:19):
and subsequently assigned to complainants. The same company filed a
similar bill against the same defendant to restrain him from
infringing a patent for an improvement in barbed fence wire's
issued February eighth, eighteen sixty eight to Michael Kelly, reissued
February eighteen seventy six and assigned to the complainants. The
legal battle between the Hash design and the Glidden design,

(22:42):
which was very complicated by the sales of patent rights
and company interests over the years, wasn't settled until eighteen
ninety two, when the US Supreme Court finally settled the
matter in favor of the Glidden patents. In the end,
the biggest element that landed the decision in five favor
of the Glidden patent was his thoroughness in establishing a

(23:04):
method of operation. The court noted that no one could
claim that Glidden hadn't made quote a most valuable contribution
to the art of wire fencing in the introduction of
the coiled barb, in combination with the twisted wire by
which it is clamped and held in position. By this device,
the barb was prevented from turning or moving laterally, and

(23:27):
was held rigidly in place. The judgment further noted quote,
under such circumstances, courts have not been reluctant to sustain
a patent to the man who has taken the final
step which has turned a failure into a success. In
the law of patents, it is the last step that wins. Yeah.
They really talk about how his language includes like exactly

(23:50):
how to make the wire, whereas Haiti's and some of
the others are like, and then you strike it with
a hammer, and they're like, that's too nebulous, whereas his
is very, very dear in the middle of the many
suits and legal steps along the way. Hash also wrote
a pamphlet telling his side of the story in eighteen eighty,
which was titled A Reminiscent Chapter from the Unwritten History

(24:13):
of Barbed Wire Prior to and immediately following the celebrated
decision of Judge Blodgett December fifteenth, eighteen eighty. In this book,
Hash makes clear that he feels that his work on
barbed wire was much more serious than Gliddon's writing quote,
while Uncle Joe was working in his pasture lot winding
his experimental wire on an empty nail keg twisting it

(24:36):
as best he could. I had transformed the second story
of my carpenter shop, a building about forty feet long,
into a barbed wire factory. Having invented a twisting device
as well as a spool same as used today, and
small hand machines to form a straight piece of wire
into the form of a letter S, I commenced operations.

(24:58):
Hash also claimed and his pamphlet that Charles F. Washburn
had approached him first with an offer to buy the
patent for the S curve barbed wire, but the two
men could not agree on a price. According to hash Quote,
the final outcome of this visit was a willingness to buy.
The question of patents was fully entered into, with his

(25:20):
summing up that they were a bugbear to many. It
was up to me to make an offer, which I did.
The price was two hundred thousand dollars. It would have
been cheap at that Washburn had offered him only twenty
five thousand dollars. Not long after, Washburn struck the sixty
thousand dollars deal with Glidden. Hayesh releat is the way

(25:42):
that things next shifted in his dealings with Washburn. Quote,
but what of mister Washburn, Well, he was heard from
later on when notice was served on poor Lone Jacob
by the United States Marshal to show cause for peaceably
pursuing a legitimate business under protection of patents granted by

(26:02):
the United States government. I had yet to learn that
patents which had not been adjudicated in the courts were
oftentimes a broken read upon which to lean. Allow me
to say just here that among the first patents granted
me was one showing iron posts with a section of
woven wire stretched between them, identically the same fence now

(26:23):
called the elwood woven wire queer. How some things come about,
isn't it? Yeah? That whole book is very much like
I did all these things. They just wrote it up more.
It's I can't understand its frustration. Haysh clearly sees his
pamphlet as the same sort of document as the booklet

(26:45):
that was produced by Washburn and Mowen just a few
years earlier. The end of it contains a section headed
as summary, and in it he lays out his case
to claim the invention of barbed wire. Quote. The s
barb was my invention and the first precal and commercially
successful barbwire. Introduced. One of my early patents shows the

(27:05):
first iron post for field fence with a section of
woven wear. I had an operation the first twisting and
spooling device I sent out to the trade the first
wooden spool on which barbwire is wound. No change since
I secured the first dipping paint for barbedwire. I introduced
the first automatic barbwire machinery. The principles involved in my

(27:28):
hand machines for twisting, spooling, and putting on the barbs
were the same as now used in all automatic barb
wire machinery. I introduced a new era in the methods
of advertising which are in vogue today. Have I done
my share? It seems entirely likely that the legal battles
contributed to Gliddon's desire to sell his steak in the

(27:52):
company in eighteen seventy six, but he was also busy
with other projects that may have factored into the decisions.
A hotel that same year, the Glidden House Hotel on
Dacab's Second Street, where it crossed Lincoln Highway. In February
of eighteen seventy seven, Joseph and Lucinda's daughter Elva, got
married to William Henry Bush Junior. Glidden gave the newlyweds

(28:16):
his eight hundred acre farm property, and he and Lucinda
moved into town to live at the hotel. The Bushes
didn't live on the farm, though William had a business
in Chicago and they lived there. Glidden was living in
town and also set his sights on being a newsman.
In the summer of eighteen seventy nine, he started publishing

(28:37):
the Dacab Chronicle. He also established a bank in town
in the early eighteen eighties. All of these shifts, with
the exception of the bank, happened before the frying Pan
Ranch project, and even once he was invested in the ranch,
he still had never been there. He didn't visit the
ranch until eighteen eighty four. Part of the land of

(28:59):
the ranch became the seat of Amerlo, Texas, and Joseph
visited in eighteen eighty seven to be part of its establishment.
He eventually dissolved his partnership with Sanborn and gave his
son in law the Texas property as well. So here
is an interesting twist in the Glidden and Hash relationship
in the mid eighteen nineties. They came together in the

(29:21):
interest of education. There was this big effort in the
eighteen nineties to establish a normal school, meaning a teacher
training school into Cab, Illinois, and both Glidden and Hash
were instrumental in making it happen financially. Glidden donated sixty
four acres to the facility, and at the suggestion of Hash,
Glidden was the one to break ground on it. And

(29:42):
I love this little detail. He used a pencil to
break ground as a symbol of the importance of knowledge
and education. And it seems that the two men, who
both became very wealthy, successful leaders in the community, were
not holding grudges from those long legal battles. The normal
school that they both helped pay for into Cab eventually

(30:02):
became Northern Illinois University. Joseph Glidden died on October ninth,
nineteen oh six, and was buried in Fairview Cemetery, into Cab.
He was ninety three and he'd built a business empire
in his life. He had lost his wife Lucenda in
eighteen ninety five and his daughter Elva earlier in nineteen
oh six. In his will, he left twenty two thousand

(30:26):
dollars to the city of dacab to build a free hospital.
He left an additional five thousand dollars for funding two
free hospital wards, which were the Lucenda Warned Glidden Room
and the Elva Glidden Bush Room. Hash outlived his rival
and collaborator by a considerable number of years. He died

(30:46):
in early nineteen twenty six, just shy of his one
hundredth birthday. He left or reported one hundred fifty thousand
dollars earmarked for a public library. That library was built
and still exists today as the Hash Memorial Library. These
twenty two thousand dollars for a hospital and one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for a library are sounds so quaint,

(31:07):
that's incredibly quaint, So okay. In early nineteen oh six,
a write up about barbed wire in the Belvidere Daily
Republican details the story of Glyndon, Elwood and Hash and
paints a picture of the three men that's pretty frank
about their conflicts, but also manages to honor all of them.

(31:30):
That rite up concludes with the following paragraph quote the
three patriarchs Joseph, Jacob and Isaac are all living into
cab at peace with one another, and all equally beloved
by the townspeople who know that it was the three
who made the town famous. When Joseph, Jacob, and Isaac
get together at a birthday celebration or other function, they

(31:51):
pitch bouquets at each other around the banquet board, while Rose,
who put the first idea in their heads, is gone
and is for God. I love that. In the end,
they were all like, listen, we're all wealthy and successful.
Can we just hang and be buddies, Like we're just
old dudes who have shaped this town. And they were like, yeah,

(32:12):
let's see that. Yeah, which to me is interesting because
we have talked so many times on the show about
patent rivalries, right how there's obviously so much indignation and
hurt feelings in there that most people never get over
that hump. And they were all just like, I don't know,
I got rich anyway, It's fine, it's fine, it's a delight.

(32:36):
I have really really cute email. And I mean okay
in a very flattering way and not a pejorative way.
Sometimes cute kids. He's like, oh that's cute. This is
not that This is legitimately the cutest email. The subject
line is you want Corvid photos and our listener did

(32:57):
not sign their name, so in their email they're just
listed as see Joy and I don't know how they
prefer to be addressed, but they write I love Corvid
so much. I have two Corvid tattoos, one a pair
of magpies, one that was made from a photo I
took of crows circling above an ancient tea house in Narwa, Japan.

(33:20):
The most unusual corvids I've ever seen are alpine chuffs,
which live in high mountains in Europe, Asia, and Africa
and are the world's highest nesting birds. A few months
after learning of their existence, I was on vacation in Zermat, Switzerland,
trying to decide whether it would be worth it to
try to buy a very expensive ticket about seventy dollars
US if I remember correctly, to take the Gorner Grat Railway,

(33:43):
an old cog railway that is the second highest railway
in Europe. While looking up pictures of the top of
Corner Grot to decide if the view would be worth it,
I saw an alpine chuff in one of the photos
and made up my mind that the chance of seeing
a species of Corvid I had never seen before was
worth the price. I saw several They congregate at the
popular tourist site to scavenge food scraps, and are so

(34:05):
used to humans that I was able to get some
very close up photos. Alpine chuffs have black feathers with
a green and purple sheen, bright yellow beaks, bright red legs,
and a bubbly, high pitched call. And then our listener
attaches photos which are gorgeous, and even an audio that

(34:26):
they took of their call, which is quite pretty. This
is so lovely. I feel almost guilty that I have
conjured all of the corvid people to send me things.
I'm happy as a clam that you're doing it, never
a directive, but always happy to receive these things so beautiful.

(34:48):
And now I'm like, dang it do I got to
plan this trip because I would like to see those birds.
We'll see what happens. But I love a Corvid tattoo.
We'll see if those ever happen for me. If you
have any bird, cat, dog, snake, spider, maybe just for me.
I don't know how Tracy feels. I'm spiders. I love

(35:09):
spiders or or other or history things you want to
send us, or just something you want to talk about.
You can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can also subscribe to the podcast as easy as pie.
That is easy to do on the iHeartRadio app or
anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed

(35:34):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Joseph F. Glidden and the Contentious Invention of Barbed Wire