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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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.