Wire is very easy to draw -- given the right tools. Examples date back to antiquity, with wire being easy to form for jewelry, inlays, etc., as well as commercial or practical uses.
I've even done it myself; twas a particularly boring summer (remember 2020?..), I decided to collect all my saved-up solder, clean it (flux), strain out the random bits of wire, SMT chips etc., and cast into bars. Then I hammered it round, and drew into wire.
For drawing plate, I used what I have on hand -- a set of drills and an aluminum bar. A peculiar choice for die, but solder doesn't stick to aluminum and it's still harder than solder, so, sure, why not? I made holes ranging from about 1/4" down to, well I'd have done 1/16" if I had it but that drill broke a long time ago and I never replaced it. The holes are tapered by way of wallowing them out with the drill (makes an hourglass shaped cross section), and reaming with the tang of a file (which is... not very sharp -- a tapered square or hex shape -- more of a burnishing than a cutting process!). Eventually I got enough holes, close enough in size, that I was able to pass wire through the whole sequence. A little grease serves as lube (mandatory, the wire will tear without it) and a strong set of pliers serves for traction.
Despite the simple means, the holes and thus wire end up quite smooth. The holes are reasonably round by way of rotational symmetry, which also smears out surface defects; likewise the wire passing through, might get hung up on surface defects (ring-shaped bumpiness?), but it's moving perpendicular to those so the same error is applied over the wire -- it ends up smooth.
Getting started on the next hole down, is the main challenge; well, that and having enough strength to pull the stuff through, depending on how active you've been -- which, fortunately(??), was also something 2020 made me realize the importance of... The pinch at the end, from grabbing the wire, often has a small enough cross-section it can be twisted into the hole, or can be hammered down to a taper if that's not enough. Extra leverage may be needed to pull through the thickest sizes (~1/4"), which may also yet be lumpy from the casting/hammering; I just grabbed it from the side and pried against the plate, which mars the wire surface but it's got plenty of drawing left to do and smooths out by 1/8" or so.
Consistency is key. You can weld solder wire together easily enough, but the joint will be a different alloy -- the random mix is probably close to Sn50, so is softer than the fresh Sn63 I have. Such joints tend to break when drawn down with the rest of the metal.
The cross section also doesn't draw round as fast as you might think. You'll probably start with a somewhat lopsided or squarish cross section, and find that the corners smoosh down first, eventually leaving narrow patches of low material, being pushed in from the sides. It's also easy to hammer solder over itself to a similar end, leaving laminae that eventually comes loose on drawing. Finally, hard sites don't draw down with the solder, instead delaminating and tearing apart (even after straining, I ended up discovering a few small bits of copper/iron in this way

).
I ended up with a couple batches of around 6ft each, totaling, Idunno, half a pound or so? Welded together (somewhat crudely; I'm not going out of my way to draw down the whole assembled length and probably just tear it up even more!) it's stored on a spool and I've even made use of it from time to time (works fine as anything with paste flux).
Like I said, it was a slow summer...
For something like iron or copper, of course you'll need a hardened drawing plate for the former, and preferably for the latter as well; you'll also need to anneal from time to time (notice I didn't mention that for solder -- room temp is adequate to anneal that, as it happens -- one reason why leaded solder isn't prone to cracking, however lead-free you might need some time in the oven every couple of passes?). A hardened plate isn't even that hard to make; in the olden days, a tapered spade drill could be made in annealed carbon steel, then hardened. The holes can be further cleaned out with abrasive slurry and a stick, or leather cord, say. Or just by drilling with abrasive slurry in the first place -- it's extremely time-consuming, but hey, carved and faceted jewelry has been made this way for millennia!
And yeah, iron wire has been in regular use for various purposes through the industrial revolution; it wasn't really a good engineering material until post Bessemer or so, for a couple reasons:
1. Wrought iron has slag inclusions. Remember my comment about consistency and delamination? I can just imagine this stuff would be... challenging to draw out. And, I don't think there's a hot-drawing process, really, not without technical ceramics. (That said, I do wonder if a high-fired clay or mullite die would hold up to a useful number of miles of hot, scaly iron?)
2. Sulfur and phosphorus impurities. These were problematic in early Bessemer steel, in terms of hot-shortness (difficult to forge) and cold tolerance (raised ductile-brittle transition temperature). Or, I forget what exactly phosphorus does here, maybe it's mostly just the effect of sulfur I'm thinking of. Or it's beneficial and that's the point, it's burned out preferentially. Oh, that's probably the trick, P neutralizes S to some extent? Not sure. It's been quite a while since I did much reading on metallurgy alas.
Anyway, it's rather difficult to leach or burn out sulfur, it tends to stay in solution. So it varies with ore quality and processing, I think. As do the trace alloys. Which also tend to burn out before the iron does (reactive metals like Ti, V, Cr, Mn), so in addition to a very mild steel (no carbon) after blowing, it's, well,
very mild, not much strength in it at all now, and those trace alloys have to be reintroduced. Mn and C being the easiest to add (speigeleisen).
The main innovation of modern steelmaking is the basic oxygen process, keyword "basic": the hearth is lined with magnesia bricks, which combine with the sulfur, drawing it out. (Bessemer's invention used traditional clay-based (acidic, silica and alumina) refractories, which had no effect on sulfur content.)
Still, it was good enough to build contemporary structures: suspension bridges with iron links and steel cables were now possible in the 1800s.
Consequently, barbed wire, and telegraph cable, were produced industrially as well. Yes, telegraphs used iron quite often, at least as I understand it. Would've needed rather large conductors, but, well, if 18 gauge is cheap enough anyway, who cares, right? Copper took over as real electricity distribution began (not just piddly telegraph signals), along with the development of useful insulation as we know it (rubber, fabric, enamel, and extruded polymers when they arrived).
Faraday's own experiments in magnetism, were done with -- oh I forget if it was iron or copper wire -- wrapped with thread or fabric, and carefully laid in layers spaced with fabric. Rough times they were, before anyone else needed insulated wiring!
No one was making chain-link fence, or did some castle have such things
The castles were too busy knitting the chain into armour rather than fencing
Au contraire, chainmail is excellent protection for [sport] fencing!

Tim