Barbed Wire

Barbed wire is steel fencing wire built with sharp barbs or points spaced along its strands, used to build inexpensive fences and to bar passage over walls and open ground. The first United States patent for barbed wire was granted in 1867 to Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio; the commercially dominant modern form, nicknamed The Winner, was patented in 1874 by Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois. Barbed wire became a defining feature of First World War trench warfare, strung in dense entanglements in front of trench lines by every combatant to stop infantry assaults and channel attacking troops into the killing zones of machine guns and artillery. Wire entanglements of this kind were broken open by the tank for the first time in 1916, and by the Allied breakthrough at Amiens on 8 August 1918 the tank had defeated barbed wire as a battlefield obstacle.