I’ve been struggling for words lately. Something to do with the state of the world perhaps. Or just laziness. It’s usually one or the other. This morning felt like another Friday without much to say, when I typed wotw (that’s short for Word of the Week btw) into a text message and it autocorrected it to ‘wire’. Ooh, I thought. That’s an interesting word.
First of all, is it one syllable or two? Depending on where you were brought up and who by, you might pronounce it “why-er” or you might say “waaa”? If you say the latter, you’d probably rather I’d said “by whom”.
Secondly, where would we be without wire? Electrics, lifting, cheese cutting, fencing… they all rely on wire. But what inventive mind first had the idea of pulling on a lump of metal until it got thinner and longer and thinner and longer? Anyone who’s ever chewed gum will know the physical pitfalls involved in that. But the Egyptians were doing it nearly 5,000 years ago, turning strips of silver and gold into thin, cylindrical wires for jewellery by pulling them through little holes in stones. Imagine how hard you’d have to pull. Must have been one hell of a donkey!
Wire drawing (making wire by drawing it through a hole) caught on in England in the 15th century, mostly for use in the manufacture of pins and wool cards (used for disentangling wool fibres). It would take until 1729 for textile dyer and DIY astronomer Stephen Gray to discover that wire could be used for conducting electricity.
Then they worked out that they could use wire as a telegraph (1816) to send messages, setting up Samuel Morse to send his first telegraph message (1844), “What hath God wrought?”, but which I think he meant “What’s God gone and done this time?” – a question we’ve been asking about the United States ever since.
If you added up all the wire in the world today, you’d have quite a lot. There are 930,000 miles of it under the sea alone. While wireless technology may be all the rage, and your landline (if you still have one) is about to become obsolete, as long as there is cheese in the world we will always have a need for wire.
