Fascinating
Buried in the comments of this post at Great Guys Weblog, is this excerpted trivia gem:
I think you are wrong about the telephone. Early adopters included the rich, but the real go-getters were doctors (who gained greatly in efficiency in the days of house calls) and dry-goods merchants. Not poor, but hardly to be counted among the overprivileged.And cowboys. At the XIT, the world's biggest ranch, cowboys carried handsets in their saddlebags with magnetos. They would hook them to the barbwire and were able to shout simple messages back to the ranchhouse. The first mobile phones, and these were adopted at least as early as, if not earlier than, the installation of phones in mansions.
~ Harry Eagar
posted by Oroborous at 9:25 PM
5 Comments:
I haven't looked this up, so can't know for sure if it is true.
However, every time I have stumbled across something Harry has related, it has corroborated what he said.
High praise indeed.
The barb-wire phone would be a great bit for Mythbusters. (w/wood fence posts)
What's Mythbusters?
Very often, I cannot recall where I pick up this stuff, but in this case it was in J. Evetts Haley's 'The XIT Ranch and the Llano Estacado.'
"MythBusters is a popular-science television program on the Discovery Channel starring special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Every week the cast & crew perform experiments to verify or debunk urban legends, old wives' tales, and the like."
"That's right, they do more than explain how something may or may not be scientifically possible. Through trial and error they actually demonstrate it."
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