Snail Telegraphy
The “pasilalinic-sympathetic compass,” or snail telegraph, was the misguided invention of a charismatic 19th-century French occultist named Jacques Toussaint Benoit. Benoit was convinced that any two snails that had once mated remained forever in telepathic contact, no matter the distance between them. Touch one, and its mate would move. Based on this principle, Benoit devised a pair of contraptions consisting of 24 snails glued to the bottom of a bowl, each representing a different letter of the alphabet. Each snail’s mate was affixed, with a corresponding label, to a receiving device that could be installed anywhere in the world. “Space was not considered by snails. Place one in Paris, the other at the antipodes, the transmission of thought along their sympathetic current as complete, instantaneous and effective as in his room on the troisieme,” writes Sabine Baring-George in the 1889 book Historic Oddities and Strange Events.
In 1850, with the help of his friend Jules Allix, Benoit offered to demonstrate the snail telegraph to a noted journalist using transmitters at opposite ends of a room:
Under one pretext or another, the inventor ran from one apparatus to the other, the whole time, so that it was not very difficult, with a little management, to reproduce on his animated compass the letters transmitted by M. Jules Allix. The transmission, moreover, was not as exact as it ought to have been. M. Jules Allix had touched the snails in such order as to form the word gymnase; Benoit on his compass read the word gymoate. Then M. Triat, taking the place of the inventor, sent the words lumiere divine to M. Jules Allix, who read on his compass lumhere divine. Evidently the snails were bad in their orthography. The whole thing, moreover, was a farce, and the correspondence, such as it was, was due to the incessant voyages of the inventor from one compass to the other, under the pretext of supervising the mechanism of the two apparatuses.
Alas.
* More on other means of long-distance communication: the Optical Telegraph, Acoustic Mirrors, Odd Sympathy.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:04 am
This reminds me of one of the navigation methods described in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before. The active agent there was not telepathy, but “the powder of sympathy”. Apply this powder to a bandage, it was believe, and anyone whose wounds had been wrapped in that bandage would notice the sensation. Mariners used this by keeping a wounded dog on board ship. Every hour on the hour, back at port, someone was employed to apply powder to the weapon which injured the beast, and thus the ship would have a fixed time reference. To ensure that this worked, however, the wound on the dog was never allowed to heal. A tricky job, keeping the dog permanently injured but not to kill it at sea.
Perhaps unsuprisingly, Eco did not invent this method of navigation. It was actually proposed in the seventeenth century by Sir Kenelm Digby.
November 16th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
HA! If that didn’t work, they just used a ouija board!
November 27th, 2006 at 1:46 am
[...] He even staged a live demonstration. Read on to see how it turned out: Link [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 2:31 am
[...] He even staged a live demonstration. Read on to see how it turned out: Link [...]
January 14th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
[...] Snail Telegraphy [...]
March 9th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Amusingly enough, in the popular manga One Piece a parody of this snail communication device is used to transmit information like a combination telephone/fax machine. Who says mock science is dead?