Utility poles. And the wires strung between them. Those who have grown up in the U.S. generally don’t notice them––or how unsightly they look. But visitors from abroad are often astonished. In much of the rest of the rich world, utility lines are hidden, underground and out of sight.

Complaining about the wires draped all Gulliver-like across America isn’t just a European pastime; 19th-century Americans did the same. Samuel Morse, credited with the first deployment of utility poles, decided to foul America’s streets and skies only when efforts to run telegraph lines underground failed. Concerns that lines were unsightly and would require the ongoing destruction of trees were one reason Thomas Edison developed underground electrical wiring (for Brockton, Massachusetts).

Still, in an America without utility poles, we wouldn’t have received the photograph above from a reader in York County, Pennsylvania (that would be the York County whose official seal features an idyllic country road unmarred by overhead wires). What’s the purpose of the yellow mesh wrapped around the pole?

via Utility Poles: Should we send them underground?.