Trying to verify jeremy-ken-andersonβs origin for the phrase βgoing haywireβ has sent me on a JOURNEY. Looking it up online gave me a bunch of websites confidently asserting (sans sources) that the phrase originates in lumber yards, where it was used to describe lumber yards that were, essentially, held together with hay wire. A couple others mentioned that it might have originated from hay wire getting tangled β but, again, no sources. Which meant it was time for a bit more digging.
First port of call was the Oxford English Dictionary (institutional access my beloved). Their earliest record for hay wire as a noun dates to 1917; as you would expect, the definition is just βWire for binding bales of hay, straw, etc.β Conversely, Etymonline tells us that the noun haywire comes from 1891, and though the websiteβs founder doesnβt list specific sources under each entry, I have generally found it to be a reliable website. Itβs also good to keep in mind that words and phrases can circulate orally for some before theyβre written down and that the OED isnβt exhaustive.
Anyway, OED gives a second meaning of haywire as an adjective:
Poorly equipped, roughly contrived, inefficient, esp. hay-wire outfit (from the practice of using hay-wire for makeshift repairs). Originally U.S.
And that adjective was, as far as OED records say, in use by 1905. So now we know that hay-wire entered the English language as a noun circa the late 19th century and had developed a colloquial meaning by the early 20th β but that colloquial meaning was not the one we attribute to it today. It was more akin to the way we might say something is held together by duct tape and hope.
The phrase βgo haywireβ didnβt turn up in print until at least 1929.
When some element in the recording system becomes defective it is said to have gone haywire.
β New York Times 13 October, 1929 (via OED)
But why is this timeline so important? Well. Even if the phrase came into oral use before 1929, it still pre-dates the invention of the automatic hay baler.
Wire (or twine) was used in agriculture prior to that, though! Before Hay balers, there were reapers, which reaped grain. The bundles still had to be bound by hand, until the invention then mass production of a reaper that could bundle the grain automatically in the early 1870s β and that thing was scary.
Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain, whirled a wire around it, fastened the ends of that wire with a twist, then cut the bundle loose and dropped it to the ground.
But the reaper harbored a fatal defect with its use of wire. It fell into straw and killed cattle. It became mixed with wheat and sparks burned several flour mills down. It lacerated fingers of handlers.
β Bridon Cordage, The History of Twine in North American Agriculture (archived)
So, there is a connection between agricultural wire and combustion (and disaster or chaos more broadly) that falls on a plausible place in the timeline, but the wire was used for grain rather than hay.
This brings us back to automatic hay balers. Automatic hay balers that actually tied the bales didnβt come about until 1936, when a guy called Edward Nolt bought a shitty prototype version of an automatic bailer from its inventor, George Innes, and spent the next winter trying to make it work. He had a functional machine in 1937 and built 35 more over the next two years, but it wasnβt until late 1940 that Noltβs baler was produced on a large scale by New Holland Machine Co. [source]
All of which tells us that the invention of the automatic self-tying hay baler was at least seven years after the origin of the phrase βgo haywireβ (again, assuming βgo haywireβ hadnβt been in common oral use before it was written down). While itβs certainly possible that George Innes β or some other hopeful inventors lost to history β had been trying prototypes before then and accidentally created bale bombs in the process, it strikes me as a little unlikely that this happened with enough regularity that βgo haywireβ got coined and moved out of agricultural circles to be used in the New York Times by 1929. Maybe the big bales made by the early hay presses (i.e., when hay was pressed down but still had to be tied by hand) were prone to exploding β that might work, timeline-wise. But I canβt find anything about hay bales exploding because of too much outwards force.
So I wonβt discount that going haywire could have its origins somewhere in the dangers inherent in farming, but it seems implausible that it originates from hay bales that exploded because of self-tying hay balers. I think itβs more likely to have come from βhay-wire outfitβ, evolving from βpoorly-run or slapdash lumber yards = things breaking and going wrong -> workers scrambling to keep things running -> general state of chaosβ.
