Although Joseph Glidden is considered the "father of barbed wire," a man by the name of Michael Kelly had invented barbed wire six years before Glidden received his patent in 1874. However, Kelly's invention, which employed diamond-shaped barbs to form what he called a "thorny fence," did not find a large market and was eventually superseded by Glidden's fencing system.

After seeing a farmer's nail-like fencing at a county fair in 1873, Glidden was inspired to make his own product. Legend states that he was in his kitchen trying to determine a way to prevent animals from entering his wife's garden. Experimenting with a modified coffee grinder, he placed two pins on one end of it, one centered and the other just off-center to allow for a wire to slide through. When he hand-cranked the device, it twisted the wire into a loop, which was clipped to form sharp points. Glidden placed the barbs on a strand of wire and used an old grindstone to twist another length of wire around the first, locking the barbs into place. When the two-stranded barbed wire was lined across a field or pasture, the sharp prongs prevented livestock from leaning against the fence and prohibited outside intruders as well.

Barbed wire no doubt had a profound effect on the settlement of the American West, but it was also used as an implement of war. It was used in the Spanish-American War (1898) to secure buildings and protect ammunition dumps, and it was used more extensively during World War I (1914-1918). In addition to protecting secure locations and temporarily enclosing prisoners of war, large hedges of barbed wire were employed in front of trenches to slow frontal assaults. The barbs slowed oncoming forces by grabbing clothing, tearing skin, and forcing a slow approach to the trenches. Caught up in the sharp edges, charging soldiers became easy targets for rifle and machine gun fire. Barbed wire contributed to the lengthy stalemate World War I became before tanks were employed to crawl over it.

After World War I, barbed wire was used in prisons and concentration and prisoner of war camps to confine human detainees. The wire was used on top of walls, along boundaries, or inside camps to slow anyone attempting to cross. It was sometimes electrified to increase its effectiveness. Barbed wire was used in the boundary line between East and West Berlin during the early days of the Cold War and in some instances for the purpose of torturing humans. It has been erected in detainee and refugee camps and for crowd control in urban areas. In stark contrast to Glidden's promotional posters of the late nineteenth century, barbed wire has been negatively depicted in propaganda posters, literature, and paintings, usually to denote suffering or imprisonment.

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