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The outbreak of World War I led to a revolution in modern warfare, and the use of barbed wire on the battlefield was one of the many technologies relied upon to hamper the enemy's attack. Used by American cattle ranchers since the 1870s, barbed wire was adapted on the Western Front to serve a more gruesome purpose than containing livestock. [2]
Jules-Louis Breton (1872-1940). The Breton-Prétot machine was a saw designed to cut the barbed wire protecting enemy trenches of World War I.The first version consisted of a small circular saw, driven by a six hp engine, attached to a long lever that was placed on a small cart with four wheels, that had to be pushed towards its objective.
World War I entanglements could in some places be tens of metres thick and several metres deep, with the entire space filled with a random, tangled mass of barbed wire. Entanglements were often not created deliberately, but by pushing together the mess of wire formed when conventional barbed wire fences had been damaged by artillery shells.
In World War I the Bangalore torpedo was primarily used for clearing barbed wire before an attack. It could be used while under fire, from a protected position in a trench. The torpedo was standardized to consist of a number of externally identical 1.5 m (5 ft) lengths of threaded pipe, one of which contained the explosive charge.
Barbed wire for agriculture use is typically double-strand 12 + 1 ⁄ 2-gauge, zinc-coated (galvanized) steel and comes in rolls of 400 m (1,320 ft) length. Barbed wire is usually placed on the inner (pasture) side of the posts. Where a fence runs between two pastures livestock could be with the wire on the outside or on both sides of the fence.
Experiences of trench warfare on the Western front in 1914–1916 indicated that British artillery was unable to reliably destroy barbed-wire barricades, which required shells to explode instantaneously on contact with the wire or ground surface: British high-explosive shells would penetrate the ground before exploding, rendering them useless ...
War of the Worlds (2005): Sure, the ending is as lousy as any as Spielberg has ever done. But every second leading up to it is as riveting and staggering as any filmmaker should be legally capable of.
Barbed wire was a farmer's product at first, but cattlemen eventually adopted it to fence off their larger tracts of land. [3] Barbed wire became an important factor in changing the cattle industry, as the free, open range became parceled off by barbed wire. Because of this development, the West saw the rise of big-pasture companies.