Wouldn’t it be more economical to install it in straight lines? I am sure there is a good reason but searching for it turns up nothing.
In: Engineering
Because it’s meant to be a barrier, it’s meant to be hard to cross and attempting to do so should end up with the person tangled up in it. If it’s loose and jumbled in loops it’s harder to keep steady and cross. If it was laid flush with the ground or the top of a wall, all you’d need would be a moderately thick blanket or rubber mat laid on top of it and then you’d cross with no problem. You can still do that in looped wire but it’s much harder because it moves and rolls as you put weight on it and throws you off.
Loops make it harder to cross, and harder to just cut and move out of the way since it can be anchored down every loop to what ever its sitting on.
Just to add to the discussion. Canadian concertina wire was coated with an anticoagulant to make you keep bleeding. (At least that’s what we were told and anecdotal experience confirms)
**Straight line:**
Put a jacket over it, climb over as easy as a fence post.
To get it at waist/chest level, you need to tension it between two posts, which means that if you cut it with bolt cutters, it’ll fall to the ground, immediately useless.
Drive a vehicle over it, and it’ll bend down and embed itself into the ground no problem.
**Coil:**
Put a jacket over it, and you’ll just bend the adjacent coils inward towards you.
You can get it to waist/chest level just by… letting it sit there. If someone tries to cut it, they’ll need to cut at least two separate places and still, carefully, drag a section away.
Drive a vehicle over it, and the loops will probably get caught in the tires/treads and wrap around the axles or sprockets, wrecking the machinery.
can everybody just hate that we as humans evolved this technology?
I’ve been to the barbed wire museum in Western Kansas. Cattle herds being shipped to markets nearby trampled anything in the way, including sometimes crops that settlers needed to survive. You can listen to Gunsmoke radio episodes for examples. Barbed wire was originally to keep people out, now it is mainly to keep animals in.
But like any new thing, there was a lot of experimentation for manufacturing and practical considerations. This museum has literally hundreds of examples of barbed wire and derivatives thereof.
They also make it in straight lines, at least for barbed wire, [like this.](https://www.358meshfence.com/img/barbed-wires-chain-link-fence.jpg) Probably a little less secure than loops, but probably cheaper.
Its for psychological effect. People see razor wire in a straight line and they can picture themselves getting over it. People see razor wire in coils and they picture themselves getting tangled up in it. Over time enough people sacraficed themselves attempting to get over the razor wire that, yep, its more economical to use it in loops.
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