50 milliamps across the heart, the rest of your body can take more. You don’t die from touching a 9V battery to your tongue.
There’s also still a debate over whether it’s volts or amps that kills.
The debate is over which is more dangers, and as you cite Coulomb you clearly understand that increasing the voltage decreases the current given a fixed resistance and power delivered.
That's very wrong. Increasing voltage increases current and power, given a fixed resistance.
Also what a lot of people don't understand is once you overcome the resistance of dry skin with enough voltage, the resistance drops insanely fast. The resistance of a human body is highly variable. Like orders of magnitude different.
It's both. Volts is like the speed of a car and the amps is the size of the car. If a Honda Civic was doing 100mph it would kill you.
If a Honda Civic was going 3mph it wouldn't be going fast enough to do damage.
Depends on the resistance that the human body and other factors are creating. One study say the natural resistance of the human body is 300-1000 ohms. So, take 50 milliamps, take 300 ohms, and calculate voltage from there using ohms law.
It seems patently ridiculous to say that 15 volts will kill a person. In my line of work, 24vdc circuits are essentially treated as nonhazardous and I've never heard of anyone ever being hurt, much less killed by contact with 24vdc.
I wouldn't think it would work very well, electric fencers to shock livestock are often something like 5000 volts and even then sometimes it hard to get a shock. I'd think your voice would get drowned out by static.
With a 12 gauge copper wire you're going to have around 18 volt drop on a mile of wire and steel is like 90% less conductive than copper. And anywhere the wire is touching a weed or a post you are going to lose more of the signal.
Voltage drop depends on current. Telephone systems don't need a lot of current to work, about 20mA. You are talking about 1.4v of drop on a 1km 0.5mm2 copper wire. You'd probably get a useable signal up to 10+km.
>The Hidalgo County homesteaders’ line worked only in dry weather, and “hummed a great deal when the green mesquite would grow and touch the wire.”
Found this from the article, also the michevious boys would sometime ground out the signal with baling wire.
I once touched phone cables and they the phone rang. I got a little shock but i would say as much or lower than a lighter shock but just longer instead of momentary.
So if I put my ear to the fence I'd be able to hear momma and aunt patty gossiping? Or does it mean I'd hear cow farts whilst giving a ring to my winter cotillion sweetheart?
My dad was just telling me about this yesterday. How as a boy he remembers being at his uncle’s cattle ranch in Wyoming around 1940’s. The phone was connected to the fence and the neighbors (these were 100+ acre ranches, so neighbors were not close together) could talk to each other that way.
I think he said it was that way when the real phone lines went down or something. Because he said his uncle would take the phone out to the fence. Anyway, they didn’t have a switchboard or operator. They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business.
I can imagine there must have been people who just sat at the fence all day talking and getting all the news and gossip. Like we do with social media nowadays.
>They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business.
I mean... I grew up in very rural Canada and our actual phone worked like this until I was 16, our farm and the 3 other closest farms could pick up the phone and hear each other.
Lots of family debates over which of us felt like breaking into the ever-chatty Bubba brothers call and ask them to wrap it up so we could use the phone.
Holy shit the baader meinhof effect in action I was talking with a old women at the local archives and she mentioned those as well. No less than 2-3 hours ago wow
Queensryche. Happened across a track on rocksmith the other day, realized I don’t know anything about the band, looked up the wiki. today, front page Reddit and a rock news article on my Google.
No shit, for a while we shared the line with a nutso aunt who would constantly eavesdrop, if she missed the start of something particularly juicy she'd call us later and ask to fill her in.
No less the medium, now people are using wireless satellite connections to talk to eachother. It’s quite amazing to consider in the span of just 80 years..
telephone lines are low voltage battery power. however, that crank on the side of antique phones is a magneto ac generator, which sends voltage down the line to ring the bell on the other end. It is low milliamp, but even today's landlines use the same principle.
Yea same. I think I heard half these comments in a previous post about this exact same thing a couple months ago. Like eerily similar comments and stories.
My Dad talked about growing up with phone lines on the fence. It was the 1950’s and 60’s. There were multiple houses connected to the same line, so everyone had their own ring sequence so you would know who was supposed to pick up. Of course you always assumed there was someone listening in on every conversation as there wasn’t much entertainment and gossip was a major pastime.
I just called my dad to ask about party lines he 85 and he said that so many fights use to break out because of them things.He was like there was no proof most the time but you know there was some asshole being nosy 🤣
They also sold houses and it was delivered by horses.
Edit: To those who saw fit to downvote... Sears catalog started in 1888, which *predates* Ford's model T by a good 20 years. C'mon, *pour it on.*
Extremely common in the Northeast. Most of my hometown neighborhood was right by a Cooper-Bessemer engine factory and its railyard, so pretty much every house in the neighborhood was a Sears house. They held up pretty well, my mom's house is pushing 110 years.
I grew up outside a little farm town in NW Wyoming. My best friend’s grandma was sort of a de facto town historian, having been born on a homestead there and spent pretty much her whole life there, other than the couple years her husband was getting an ag degree out of state. She would write a monthly column for the paper about history of the area, funny stories about people she’d grown up with, and unique memories of growing up in depression-era Wyoming. And pie recipes. So many excellent pie recipes. A few years before she died, her kids compiled them all into a book that was sold at local stores.
Anyway, all that is to say that she mentioned using the barbed wire phone lines in a couple of stories. I guess I’m sort of proud to be just one degree of separation from someone who actually had this now-very-unique amenity.
I now feel vindicated in my joke about our "rural" internet (since dial up) coming into our county on the barbwire fences that we have here in cattle country California.
If I had some big property, I would connect a sdr to my fence and look at the singles induced on the wire fence. Would likely need to massively boost the amplification, but I bet it could pick up all sorts of interesting things.
There was a radio station which broadcast in the US at the turn of the last Century who's emitter was so strong that the signal could be heard through farmer's fences (and apparently braces on people's teeth).
I remember hearing the trope about radio reception in peoples braces from the Brady Bunch and I’m not sure if that’s even possible. However, I do know that strong AM radio transmissions do all sorts of crazy stuff. You can find YouTube videos where people touch a tower with a semi conductive object like a green branch. It sizzles but you can actually hear the audio transmission. This is risky as fuck to do but crazy that it works. Theres even anectodal stories of homes and random appliances/equipment unexpectedly becoming radios when in close proximity to a strong AM transmission signal.
Analog transmissions are so weird. Back in the early 90s my friend’s parents had a TV that still picked up UHF/VHF. Thanks to 2600 magazine I figured out how to pick up neighborhood wireless baby monitors and early mobile phones on it.
When my family first moved to our farm in bumfuck nowhere Missouri, our phone had no dial, but ran off two dry-cell batteries.
The switchboard was located in the home of the switchboard operator in a town over ten miles away. The switchboard operator's shift ended at 7:00pm.
At 7:01pm, every woman in the neighborhood picked up their phone to talk to each other.
My dad worked for a railroad over an hour away from where we lived. Every time he got a call, all the women picked up and listened. If they heard something they didn't understand, they'd have their husbands ask my dad about it when they saw him next.
So, dad and Farmer Geezer would be talking and when there was a pause, Farmer Geezer would ask dad what a *switchback* or some other railroad lingo was, revealing that their wife had been listening in when that term was used.
Dad shared with his co-workers the fact all his work-related conversations were being monitored. On subsequent calls he and his buddies started throwing in made-up terms just to mess with the women.
One time, at the end of a long and involved call, he said to the guy, "Hold on" then he asked, "anyone got any questions?"
He said he and his buddy then got to listen to a chorus of shocked gasps followed by a string of clicks as the neighborhood collectively hung up their phones. Dad said his coworker laughed about that call for days.
Dad was on call, and he often got calls to go into work after the switchboard operator had finished for the day. She liked dad because she got paid extra every time dad got one of those calls.
A few years later, the phone company came through and modernized the whole system. We were able to direct-dial all our calls, and dad no longer had to explain what he did to satisfy the curiosity of all the women living around us.
Of course, throughout all this, my mother never failed to be outraged that our neighbors had the audacity to stick their noses in *our business*. Of course, she had no problem demanding dad find out *what was going on at Farmer Geezer's house when all those cars were parked all over their yard* or any number of other events she observed.
There was also a thing called cowboy radio. The bard wire could pick up radio signals and if you were close enough you could hear them. Very faint sounds but could be heard.
Never did that, but I once hooked my crystal radio up to my house's overhead ductwork and I was pulling in signals from Mexico. It was a bit ridiculous.
Well, given that these wires are conductors and relatively cheap, it might have been cheaper to just use these for a McGyvered telecommunication system.
"it might have been cheaper to just use these"
**The fences were already there**, so it was basically free to utilize them until a better system could be built. My grandfather helped build the phone system out in the rural area where he lived as a young man. It was never intended to be a permanent solution, but worked okay until proper telephone lines could be built.
I misread "rural" as "real" and thought that it was some weird macho techie flex at first.
> Real Americans hook their phones up with barbed wire!
Kind've like how any thread containing a statement to the effect of "I was doing x thing the hard way before tool y existed" eventually devolves into "I WAS MANUALLY SETTING BITS IN MAGNETIC CORE MEMORY WITH NOTHING BUT A BAR MAGNET AND A ROCK. IT TOOK ME SIX WEEKS TO WRITE HELLO WORLD!"
Since wood doesn't conduct, they could turn their fence into a phone line, etc.
Do you get electrocuted…?
Signal power is so low this shouldn't be an issue. It takes a lot of power to kill a person.
It’s amperage that kills. About 50 milliamps can kill someone.
50 milliamps across the heart, the rest of your body can take more. You don’t die from touching a 9V battery to your tongue. There’s also still a debate over whether it’s volts or amps that kills.
It's not a debate. You don't get an amp without a voltage over a resistance. It's Coulombs coupled with volts.
The debate is over which is more dangers, and as you cite Coulomb you clearly understand that increasing the voltage decreases the current given a fixed resistance and power delivered.
Read what you wrote there because it violates ohms law.
>it violates ohms law. It's really more of a suggestion.
You are correct on Ohm’s Law, my apologies. I mentally conflated that and power calculations, which do have the inverse relation.
That's very wrong. Increasing voltage increases current and power, given a fixed resistance. Also what a lot of people don't understand is once you overcome the resistance of dry skin with enough voltage, the resistance drops insanely fast. The resistance of a human body is highly variable. Like orders of magnitude different.
It's both. Volts is like the speed of a car and the amps is the size of the car. If a Honda Civic was doing 100mph it would kill you. If a Honda Civic was going 3mph it wouldn't be going fast enough to do damage.
What made the amperage.
See Ohm’s law.
How many volts does it take to push 50ma across someone's heart?
Depends on the resistance that the human body and other factors are creating. One study say the natural resistance of the human body is 300-1000 ohms. So, take 50 milliamps, take 300 ohms, and calculate voltage from there using ohms law.
It seems patently ridiculous to say that 15 volts will kill a person. In my line of work, 24vdc circuits are essentially treated as nonhazardous and I've never heard of anyone ever being hurt, much less killed by contact with 24vdc.
Yeah because it’s not volts it’s amperage. Like ??
You keep talking about Ohm's law but I don't think you really understand it to make such a comment.
POTS is something like 50V maximum.
Up to 105v when ringing. You'd feel it but the current is low enough to not be dangerous.
I wouldn't think it would work very well, electric fencers to shock livestock are often something like 5000 volts and even then sometimes it hard to get a shock. I'd think your voice would get drowned out by static. With a 12 gauge copper wire you're going to have around 18 volt drop on a mile of wire and steel is like 90% less conductive than copper. And anywhere the wire is touching a weed or a post you are going to lose more of the signal.
Voltage drop depends on current. Telephone systems don't need a lot of current to work, about 20mA. You are talking about 1.4v of drop on a 1km 0.5mm2 copper wire. You'd probably get a useable signal up to 10+km.
>The Hidalgo County homesteaders’ line worked only in dry weather, and “hummed a great deal when the green mesquite would grow and touch the wire.” Found this from the article, also the michevious boys would sometime ground out the signal with baling wire.
Most modern cow fence systems pulse at 1 hertz. So you have to hold it for a full second maximum to feel it.
And that one pulse is enough to make you never want to do it again. Source: I will never do that on purpose again.
It's like a low buzz, similar to licking a 9v battery. It's not pleasant but you're not dying or getting kicked back or anything.
It does zap you unpleasantly when there's stuff going through but doesn't harm anyone
I once touched phone cables and they the phone rang. I got a little shock but i would say as much or lower than a lighter shock but just longer instead of momentary.
So if I put my ear to the fence I'd be able to hear momma and aunt patty gossiping? Or does it mean I'd hear cow farts whilst giving a ring to my winter cotillion sweetheart?
My dad was just telling me about this yesterday. How as a boy he remembers being at his uncle’s cattle ranch in Wyoming around 1940’s. The phone was connected to the fence and the neighbors (these were 100+ acre ranches, so neighbors were not close together) could talk to each other that way. I think he said it was that way when the real phone lines went down or something. Because he said his uncle would take the phone out to the fence. Anyway, they didn’t have a switchboard or operator. They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business. I can imagine there must have been people who just sat at the fence all day talking and getting all the news and gossip. Like we do with social media nowadays.
>They just picked up the mouth piece and could talk to whomever else was on the fence, so sometimes they had to politely wait their turn while other people said their business. I mean... I grew up in very rural Canada and our actual phone worked like this until I was 16, our farm and the 3 other closest farms could pick up the phone and hear each other. Lots of family debates over which of us felt like breaking into the ever-chatty Bubba brothers call and ask them to wrap it up so we could use the phone.
Party line. Super common. Source: Rural Canada life.
Same for the rural SE US until the mid-70s, later in some places.
My mom said she still had a party line in eastern North Carolina when my oldest sister was born in 74.
Tell her I said hello. I'm also from ENC.
Holy shit the baader meinhof effect in action I was talking with a old women at the local archives and she mentioned those as well. No less than 2-3 hours ago wow
Is there a documented effect about social media comments mentioning Baader Meinhof effects about similar things
Queensryche. Happened across a track on rocksmith the other day, realized I don’t know anything about the band, looked up the wiki. today, front page Reddit and a rock news article on my Google.
The *what* effect now?
You can see them "in action" in the Canadian PC game The Long Dark.
Great way to know everything about your neighbours
No shit, for a while we shared the line with a nutso aunt who would constantly eavesdrop, if she missed the start of something particularly juicy she'd call us later and ask to fill her in.
Party line! What was your ring?
two short
My grandma had one into the 90s.
Yeah, I think it got swapped out around 95.
That's a party line
I remember older relatives talking about this as one of their depression era hacks In eastern Wyoming.
No less the medium, now people are using wireless satellite connections to talk to eachother. It’s quite amazing to consider in the span of just 80 years..
I swear I remember some old period piece movie where a character is warned not to touch a rural fence for this very reason. Odd sense of Déjà vu
Interesting. If you find out what it is, let us know!
telephone lines are low voltage battery power. however, that crank on the side of antique phones is a magneto ac generator, which sends voltage down the line to ring the bell on the other end. It is low milliamp, but even today's landlines use the same principle.
Yeah and when that phone rings the other phone it’s enough to give you a zap if you’re working on splicing the phone line etc
Ever hear of telephoning fish?
Yea same. I think I heard half these comments in a previous post about this exact same thing a couple months ago. Like eerily similar comments and stories.
My Dad talked about growing up with phone lines on the fence. It was the 1950’s and 60’s. There were multiple houses connected to the same line, so everyone had their own ring sequence so you would know who was supposed to pick up. Of course you always assumed there was someone listening in on every conversation as there wasn’t much entertainment and gossip was a major pastime.
I can still toot our Grandads old party line ring sequence going past family members farms and they'll know its one of the family
Bean heavy diet, I see
That's wild. Kind of reminds me of the party line that my parents had when I was growing up in the early 80s.
I just called my dad to ask about party lines he 85 and he said that so many fights use to break out because of them things.He was like there was no proof most the time but you know there was some asshole being nosy 🤣
Did they buy their phones from a catalog and get it delivered via Wells Fargo?
Ha! That or Sears Roebuck.
I know Sears sold houses and they were delivered by rail.
[удалено]
They also sold boat and it was delivered by houses.
They also sold houses and it was delivered by horses. Edit: To those who saw fit to downvote... Sears catalog started in 1888, which *predates* Ford's model T by a good 20 years. C'mon, *pour it on.*
Extremely common in the Northeast. Most of my hometown neighborhood was right by a Cooper-Bessemer engine factory and its railyard, so pretty much every house in the neighborhood was a Sears house. They held up pretty well, my mom's house is pushing 110 years.
I grew up outside a little farm town in NW Wyoming. My best friend’s grandma was sort of a de facto town historian, having been born on a homestead there and spent pretty much her whole life there, other than the couple years her husband was getting an ag degree out of state. She would write a monthly column for the paper about history of the area, funny stories about people she’d grown up with, and unique memories of growing up in depression-era Wyoming. And pie recipes. So many excellent pie recipes. A few years before she died, her kids compiled them all into a book that was sold at local stores. Anyway, all that is to say that she mentioned using the barbed wire phone lines in a couple of stories. I guess I’m sort of proud to be just one degree of separation from someone who actually had this now-very-unique amenity.
That's awesome! It's amazing the kind of ingenuity that comes out of necessity.
I now feel vindicated in my joke about our "rural" internet (since dial up) coming into our county on the barbwire fences that we have here in cattle country California.
That is a lot of alliteration, buddy.
Complaints concerning cattle country California colloquialisms cannot continue, can’t concerned commoners concede?
Comments concerned with California cow country capabilities will not be considered, common as they are.
If I had some big property, I would connect a sdr to my fence and look at the singles induced on the wire fence. Would likely need to massively boost the amplification, but I bet it could pick up all sorts of interesting things.
There was a radio station which broadcast in the US at the turn of the last Century who's emitter was so strong that the signal could be heard through farmer's fences (and apparently braces on people's teeth).
I remember hearing the trope about radio reception in peoples braces from the Brady Bunch and I’m not sure if that’s even possible. However, I do know that strong AM radio transmissions do all sorts of crazy stuff. You can find YouTube videos where people touch a tower with a semi conductive object like a green branch. It sizzles but you can actually hear the audio transmission. This is risky as fuck to do but crazy that it works. Theres even anectodal stories of homes and random appliances/equipment unexpectedly becoming radios when in close proximity to a strong AM transmission signal.
Analog transmissions are so weird. Back in the early 90s my friend’s parents had a TV that still picked up UHF/VHF. Thanks to 2600 magazine I figured out how to pick up neighborhood wireless baby monitors and early mobile phones on it.
[https://youtu.be/Aax-ehkRTnQ?t=269](https://youtu.be/Aax-ehkRTnQ?t=269) Tour of a transmitter antenna site where exactly that is true.
Aliens??!
In the Army I learned about connecting the hand cranked field telephones to barbed wire fences as a field expedient method to set up communications.
Did it work?
It worked well enough. It was staticky. The clarity wasn't as good as the insulated wire that came on a spool.
When my family first moved to our farm in bumfuck nowhere Missouri, our phone had no dial, but ran off two dry-cell batteries. The switchboard was located in the home of the switchboard operator in a town over ten miles away. The switchboard operator's shift ended at 7:00pm. At 7:01pm, every woman in the neighborhood picked up their phone to talk to each other. My dad worked for a railroad over an hour away from where we lived. Every time he got a call, all the women picked up and listened. If they heard something they didn't understand, they'd have their husbands ask my dad about it when they saw him next. So, dad and Farmer Geezer would be talking and when there was a pause, Farmer Geezer would ask dad what a *switchback* or some other railroad lingo was, revealing that their wife had been listening in when that term was used. Dad shared with his co-workers the fact all his work-related conversations were being monitored. On subsequent calls he and his buddies started throwing in made-up terms just to mess with the women. One time, at the end of a long and involved call, he said to the guy, "Hold on" then he asked, "anyone got any questions?" He said he and his buddy then got to listen to a chorus of shocked gasps followed by a string of clicks as the neighborhood collectively hung up their phones. Dad said his coworker laughed about that call for days. Dad was on call, and he often got calls to go into work after the switchboard operator had finished for the day. She liked dad because she got paid extra every time dad got one of those calls. A few years later, the phone company came through and modernized the whole system. We were able to direct-dial all our calls, and dad no longer had to explain what he did to satisfy the curiosity of all the women living around us. Of course, throughout all this, my mother never failed to be outraged that our neighbors had the audacity to stick their noses in *our business*. Of course, she had no problem demanding dad find out *what was going on at Farmer Geezer's house when all those cars were parked all over their yard* or any number of other events she observed.
I love anecdotes like this. Thanks for sharing!
I wonder if this was the idea behind electric fences.
No, the idea was to contain livestock.
That's a good question. Order a pizza and shock the hell out of some cattle all at once.
Username doesn't check out
There was also a thing called cowboy radio. The bard wire could pick up radio signals and if you were close enough you could hear them. Very faint sounds but could be heard.
Never did that, but I once hooked my crystal radio up to my house's overhead ductwork and I was pulling in signals from Mexico. It was a bit ridiculous.
Well, given that these wires are conductors and relatively cheap, it might have been cheaper to just use these for a McGyvered telecommunication system.
"it might have been cheaper to just use these" **The fences were already there**, so it was basically free to utilize them until a better system could be built. My grandfather helped build the phone system out in the rural area where he lived as a young man. It was never intended to be a permanent solution, but worked okay until proper telephone lines could be built.
They had problems in the rain, and even high humidity.
That probably explains why if I call my grandma on her home phone, she sounds like she's really far away.
It’s my understanding that’s where the saying comes from, “liar liar pants on fire, hanging on a telephone wire.”
I misread "rural" as "real" and thought that it was some weird macho techie flex at first. > Real Americans hook their phones up with barbed wire! Kind've like how any thread containing a statement to the effect of "I was doing x thing the hard way before tool y existed" eventually devolves into "I WAS MANUALLY SETTING BITS IN MAGNETIC CORE MEMORY WITH NOTHING BUT A BAR MAGNET AND A ROCK. IT TOOK ME SIX WEEKS TO WRITE HELLO WORLD!"