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Just read that the first chain link fence patent was from 1844... in France
I was looking up some old fence types for a client's historic property and found this on a museum website. The patent was by a guy named Charles Barnard, and it was for a 'wire fence' made in a chain link style. It just seems so early, like before the Civil War early. I always figured chain link was a 1900s thing, maybe from some big factory here. Makes you wonder how they even made the wire back then. Has anyone else run into a really old fence style that made you stop and think?
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the_tessa6mo ago
That's a cool find, but the patent date is actually wrong. The first real chain link fence patent in the US was in 1884, not 1844. It was by a guy named Charles Barnard, but he was American, not French. The 1844 date might be for a different kind of wire mesh. The machines to weave the fence like we know it just didn't exist before the late 1800s. It's easy to get those old dates mixed up on some websites lol.
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alicelopez6mo ago
Wait, does the exact patent year really matter that much? It's still an old fence either way (lol).
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ericfox4mo ago
The thing that really gets me is how something like this ties into the bigger story of industrialization... like chain link is almost a perfect symbol of the whole factory era. Before you could draw wire through dies and weave it mechanically, none of this was possible. So 1844 or 1884, the real question is what changed in between that made it actually work? The Bessemer process for steel only came in the 1850s, and the first real wire drawing machines were still pretty crude back then. It makes you look at a chain link fence completely different... like it's not just a fence, it's a trophy of engineering that took decades to pull off.
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