July 13, 2021 • 30 mins
Since before the dawn of recorded history, human beings have been obsessed with talking to each other. This primal impulse inspired French occultist Jacques-Toussaint Benoît to propose a new, global communication system in the mid-1800s, a system he was certain would replace the telegraph: collections of snails. Benoît was certain snails, after mating, remained in constant, non-physical contact, meaning pushing one would affect the other, regardless of their physical locations. So, did it work? Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer,
the one and only Mr Max Williams. They called me Ben,
and like a lot of human beings, I'm you know,
I'm I'm all about talking to people. That's funny because
it's not necessarily true sort of our job. I mean,
(00:48):
we'd sort of talk to people professionally, I guess you
could say, and in a weird bubble they don't talk back.
They do sometimes via email or you know me and
iTunes reviews, but in general we're professional communicators. Ben. Have
you ever reading Escargo Dona? Yeah, I got some in
my kitchen right now. Actually in a can, isn't that cool.
(01:10):
It's the one canned food that I think is actually
pretty gourmet. There are other gourmet can foods, but that's
really the only way to get snails is in a can.
I grew up in Germany, and uh, it was just
like a thing that I grew up eating. And I
think I took a friend of mine when I was
a little kid to a like a French restaurant and
we got scar go and he tried one. I thought
it was the most disgusting thing in the world. He
(01:32):
described it as like eating a chewy you know, ball
of snot or something like them. And your knowl And
today we are talking about snails, but maybe not in
the way you expect. Well, we'll touch on s cargo
here and there, but stales. Stales are a pretty common creature.
(01:52):
They're also fascinating. They gross some people out, you know,
some people think of them as moving boogers. They due
to you know, the slime and the way the texture
of their skin is and so on. But what Unearthed
could snails have to do with the idea of communication?
Because Max, Noel and us listening at home, and myself,
(02:15):
we're all pretty lucky to be alive in a time
where there are instantaneous means of communication across the world.
But as we're gonna see today, the idea of a
global communication network is much older than the Internet. In fact,
there was a French occultists in the eighteen fifties who
(02:36):
thought he could build a communication network with get this snails.
M It's true, you knew we were going to get
there somehow. Communications snails French occultists. What else do you want?
I want to be a French occultist. That sounds like
a cool gig um. Now it's true. The guy in
question is one Jacques tous Saint Benoit, whose experiments in
(02:57):
the eighteen fifties with snails lead to something referred to
as a snail telegraph yes or passiolytics sympathetic compass. It's
a little less sexy, but definitely sounds fancy. What is it,
ben What is it? So? Here's the idea in short,
summed up by John Brownley writing for Wired, brown Lee
(03:21):
says bin Wa is convinced that any two snails that
have hooked up are forever in telepathic contact for the
rest of their life, regardless of the distance between them
and to him. This means that if you touch one,
then the other one the mate will move. And so,
based on this concept, and Wa makes some gadgets. Wired
(03:45):
calls them contraptions. They're essentially like picture twenty four snails
glued to the bottom of a bowl, and each of
them is in bas design representative of a letter of
the alphabet. And there, yes, you're right, folks, there are
two missing letters. We'll get to those in a bit. Wait,
so glued to the bottom of a bowl with letters
(04:07):
on the top, sort of like a weird snail typewriter. Yes, yeah,
and weird and weirdly incomplete snail typewriter. Sounds like some
flint stones gadgetry right there. Yeah, And he was convinced
that you could you know, touch letters, key in letters.
Let's just say on one set of snails and the
other set of snails, however far away they might be,
(04:28):
would move so that the person on the other end
of the gadget could you know, decode whatever message you
were intending to send. Yeah, a stalelegraph, which is weird
because we call conventional mail snail mail now, but this
snail legraph was if it worked, it would be much
faster than a telegraph of the type. Right, So at
(04:51):
this point Ben was trying to do the telegraph version
of building a better mouse trap. The telegraph is already around,
and when we look at the modern day, what we
see is is pretty amazing, Like, no matter where we
are now in the world, and we've learned this recording
(05:12):
this podcast on the road, and during a pandemic, no
matter where we are, we can use various platforms to
communicate with each other to even record our show. And
that's a really recent development in the you know, in
the history of humanity. But it's something that has its
origins in pretty basic scientific principles. And as Smithsonian mag
(05:35):
points out, these were first manifests in the good old
eighteenth century electric telegraph, you know, dits and dashes. We
talked about this in the past. The story behind Morse
code is really sad. Oh god man, it's been so long.
I forget the sad part. Well, the the death of
Samuel Morse's wife was the real impetus or inspiration which
(05:57):
work of the telegraph got it? Well, thankfully. I don't
think any tragedy led into ben Wa coming up with this, uh,
this snail legraph. I think it was more perseverance and
cookie stick to itiveness. Really interesting. So he believed that
these snails could transmit like sympathetic current, isn't that right?
(06:18):
I mean it was some form of like electrical transmission.
I mean we would look at it is almost like telepathy, right,
essentially is what he's describing. But you know, he tried
to describe it in more scientific terms. But again, the
guy was like kind of a mystic. I mean occultist,
and apparently, I mean it makes sense. There's a really
great article in Gizmoto, the man who tried to have
been a telegraph made out of telepathic snails. It's a
(06:40):
mouthful of the headline by Esther ingliss Arkle. The eighteen
hundreds were a really like golden time to be an occultist. Uh.
It was sort of like the swing of the pendulum
in the other direction. After years and years of witch
burning and fearing the devil and seeing his evil lurking
around every corner, it became kind of a time where
(07:00):
paranormal exploration and magic and kind of the combination of
science and magic were very popular. Uh. And there was
a lot of belief even in just kind of regular
old folks in sciences and like the efficacy of sciences
and um looking into things like fairies and gnomes and
all of that. And ben Wah was squarely in this camp.
(07:23):
So while he, you know, it does attempt to explain
the snail phenomenon in relatively scientific terms, comparing it to
the telegraph, he clearly was coming at it from a
place of kind of you know, a weird ephemeral mysticism
as well. Yeah. Yeah. To be very clear about it,
(07:49):
ben Wah was not a scientist per se. But ben
Wah also wasn't a wealthy eccentric. So this meant that
because he didn't have a ton of cash and he
didn't have a ton of rigorous research, that he needed
to convince other people to help him. He needed help
(08:10):
funding this idea. But before you get to that, let's
dive into what he thought was going on. So as
you said, no, he believed there was some sort of
sympathetic bond or current between snails, like after they hooked up,
basically after they made it, and he believed, Ben, have
you seen snails mating like our up close video, like
(08:32):
in any nature documentaries of snails mating? I believe I
have in the past, but it's it's not one of
my go to YouTube clips. It's it's it's not nor
should it be, and it's something to be whole. The
owners never bring it up. Is because there's a really
cool movie by our documentary by a French filmmaker whose
name is Escaping Me but also did the film Winged Migration,
and it's called Microcosmos, and it's like all this amazing
(08:54):
kind of macro photography of like insects, and one of
the scenes airs like these snails just going at it
or they like to become one. They're like writhing together
and make this weird Georgia O'Keefe looking array while this
like gorgeous opera music is playing in the background, and
it's simultaneously kind of beautiful and kind of hilarious because
(09:16):
it looks ridiculous but also like very psychedelic and strange,
and the music is really sets it off. But I'm sorry,
I please you guys. Had to bring up snails mating.
It's something to see. Check out that clip. It's on YouTube.
So ben wal obviously was watching stales mate and as
I was saying, he believed that this mating process resulted
in an exchange of what he called sympathetic fluids, and
(09:39):
that the exchange of these fluids connected these snails in
a way that made them mentally inseparable. He thought of
it as an invisible an invisible string, something between a
string and fluid that emanated from one snail to the other,
a kind of natural telegraph cable. But this provided instant communication,
(10:05):
in his mind, regardless of the environment between them. So
you can put them on ocean away. It wouldn't matter.
One could be on a mountain, one could be in
a deep cavern. They would still be able to have
that vibe with each other and the way you know,
and these are snails, so we can't ask them to say,
guess a number or sing a song, right. Instead, he
(10:27):
just has to physically stimulate them. Yeah, like either by
poking them like we said, like literally tapping them like
a weird snail typewriter, or shooting them with a little
electric current that to do it. And he referred to
this phenomenon this kind of like sympathetic psychic connection with
these fluids. I don't understand how fluids interact with each other,
(10:48):
that fluids caner would travel through. I guess that's true.
It's true that we just don't understand. I can't wrap
our heads around. He termed this phenomenon scar gotic commotion,
which I just love. I'm gonna start using that in
uh in my regular conversation or maybe start a band
called escargotic commotion. Either way, this was the basis of
this whole thing. He considered this to be against said
(11:11):
this amazing obscure article. He considered this to be some
sort of evolutionary loophole, and he really believed in this phenomenon.
He had a partner as well, an American, which is weird,
who has a very French sounding name monsieur bia creti
um Americans somehow though, yeah, yeah, this is This is
(11:32):
interesting though, because some researchers believe that ben Wa made
this guy up like out of whole cloth. He never
was another person for him to to communicate with, or
maybe he was embellishing his story a little bit, but yes,
he said he had a partner. He also didn't just
(11:55):
see some snails mating and thought I should try to
turn these guys into the alphabet instead. He was building
off this earlier concept that's very hr Geiger as a
phrase flesh telegraphs. This goes back to the fifteen hundreds,
but then also earlier, just a few decades earlier. In
eighteen thirty nine, a guy named William O'Shaughnessy, an Irish
(12:19):
doctor and a fan of marijuana, had experimented with the
idea of using human skin to transmit and receive electrical signals.
Which is interesting because we know that that is a thing.
I mean, that's the reason. For example, like touch lamps work,
and like touch screens, you know, like there is some
(12:40):
connectivity between you know, we have a glove on, the
screen is not gonna work. You have a glove on,
like you know, one of those touch lamps isn't gonna work.
So it is about kind of using the human body
as a conduit for these types of signals. I mean,
it's like it's not like a current that's gonna shock you,
but we do know that the human body can transmit
these kinds of impulses. Yeah, vibes. It's not just an
(13:01):
amazing film. Uh sorry, Jeff Goldblum and one of our
favorites here on Ridiculous History. It really is quite a banger.
I highly recommend checking it out. You mentioned hundreds. But
in the Dred the Flesh Telegraph, I guess that we're
kind of being kicked around then involved fish. Yeah, yeah,
that's that is true. It's strange because everybody was trying
(13:24):
to at various points create some communication device like this,
and I think it tells us something illuminating about the
human condition. Since before the dawn of recorded history, people
were obsessed with trying to talk with one another, you
know what I mean, Like in general, So it makes
sense that people would try to find novel solutions to
(13:45):
the old problem of communication over distance, whether it's fish,
whether it's snails, whether it's human flesh. They were just
we're saying, they were throwing a lot of stuff at
the wall. Here can we can we address the elephant
in the room or the massive dead snail in the room.
The longevity of this does not really compute for me, Like,
(14:07):
you know, how you gotta keep replacing snails. I mean,
what do you used to if you feed them, it's
like it's like having a pet, It's like maintaining an aquarium.
I guess you can keep alive for a long time.
But like, first of all, when I first heard this,
I'm picturing snails lined up back to back to back
to back to back, like over a long, long distances,
like literally a snail telegraph. But again, these were supposedly,
you know, psychic snails, So I guess you only have
(14:30):
to have about twenty five of them on each end
for for the alphabet, so you know you have one died,
but then you have to make them again. It just
seems like a whole homework assignment to me. Yeah, because
you'd have to be based on the lifetime of the snails.
You'd have to be constantly ready to ship out a
new receiver to whatever remote, remote location the other receiver
(14:50):
was originally at, and that's every time a snail passes away.
It's also like, I guess people could, if this worked,
save money by just using these keyboards for as long
as they could, but it be like typing with a
broken typewriter. Eventually you'd start missing really important letters like
E or some or some other vowel. Oh, you know,
(15:12):
the LFE cycle of a snail is actually longer than
I thought. Apparently in the while they can live two
to seven years, but in captivity they can actually live
ten to fifteen years or even longer if they're like,
you know, properly fed and watered. So okay, I retract
my my beef, but there are there are a copious
other beefs to be had with this situation. Yeah, but
(15:33):
I I don't think you necessarily should, because you'd still
the point remains, you'd still have to cycle it out,
maybe just not as often as some might assume. But look,
they need help, they need credibility, and they need cash.
This pair of people represented by Ben Wah, so Ben
(15:54):
Wah starts putting the charm on this guy who manages
a gymnaisi him in Paris. His name is Monsieur try It,
and he convinces this dude to let him live, like
to pay for him to live somewhere and give him
a stipend to work on his snail telegraph. He also
(16:16):
beguiles a journalist named Jules Alex from La Press and
he gets him to like cover the unveiling of the staleygraph,
and so he sort of stages an event, right, He
does this sort of unveiling thing on October two of
(16:38):
eighteen fifty. And this is all at the behest of Triat,
who very much wants to I guess, get his money's
worth from his investment. Um. So at this point the
design of the snail agram consists of like a scaffold
situation using it was like a ten foot beam with
these zinc bowls. I don't know why I needed to
(17:01):
be zinc. Maybe because of don't he probably had his reasons.
The zinc is, I know, very conductive. With the snails
glued using copper sulfate, I can't and I think I
feel like we're burying the leads here. This doesn't seem
very friendly to the snails, not that like you know snails.
I mean, if snails have feelings, right, I think this
would be terrible. This reminds me of the way fleas
were treated in those really messed up maccab flea circus
(17:24):
as we talked about with with Gabe. Or turnspit dogs,
you know, I think would be another example. Yeah, the
snails well being isn't isn't really entering into Benwa's calculations,
and the contraption becomes increasingly complex and increasingly expensive as
they dive into it. Eventually they end up with, as
(17:46):
we said, forty eight snails overall, twenty four separate couplings
into those zinc bowls. They're glued on this wooden board
next to these alphabet symbols. We said earlier there were
inte four snails, but not twinning six. That's because this
is in French, and in French the letters W and
K are often only used for words that are loaned
(18:10):
from other languages, and that's where the author of this
post on the Generalist Academy says, that's where the discrepancy
comes from. Like they it would have been seen as
somewhat extraneous to have that W and K. Also also
patently less French, you know, because I mean the French
take their language very seriously, so they were not even
(18:32):
they like, throw those letters out. We don't use those
except for those trash American words. Who needs them? Get
rid of them? Right. So there's another thing that I
think stood out to a lot of folks who are
listening along at home. It's this, how do you know
you have a positive connection? Right? Like if somebody pokes
(18:53):
the snail that represents the letter B, and then someone
else on the other board is looking at that snail,
what counts as a signal that someone mashed B? It's
unfortunately it's kind of interpretive. I would assume it just
goes bing, you know, or a little green light lights
up on the snail's head on its little tentacles. No,
it does have to do with the tentacles. They're not
(19:14):
what do you call those things there? And yeah, there
are tentacles. They're kind of antennae meet tentacles, the little
you know, wiggly things on their heads. Uh. And that
is how you gauged it, or at least how he
claimed you could gauge it. If you tap a snail
on one of the ends, the corresponding mated snail on
the other end would wiggle its tentacles sympathetically. Yeah, before
(19:37):
it counts as a wiggle. How do you differentiate that from,
you know, a regular stale wiggle, just like a stale
can adjusting snails are always always pretty wiggly, if you
ask me, Um, those little tentacles are always kind of
flopping around willy nilly. So that's the basic idea. And
he attempts to demonstrate this, like we said, of this, Uh,
I guess you'd call it like a press conference really,
(19:58):
but it doesn't go very well. He's been kind of
stringing Tria along right this whole time. He claimed that
he had been in communication with his maybe imaginary friend.
I've got a research partner. You wouldn't know him. He
goes to another wouldn't he go to He lives in Canada, uh,
and goes to the school. So this is he was
He had never this guy had never actually seen it
(20:20):
function correctly. So this trial is not only to maybe
attract other investors and make a splash in the press,
it's also literally at the insistence of this investor who's like,
come on, you know, put your money where your mouth
is or my money where your snails mouths are. Uh.
And it didn't really go very well. Ben while was
very kind of cag right, like he you know, he
(20:43):
he would think Tria wanted to really push home this
thing worked, that there was no trickery at work, right,
So he asked if he would put a curtain up
between him and his partner that he was communicating with,
who wasn't be out by the way, right. It was
just like some assistant. It was the journalist from earlier,
that's right, who was taken by this whole thing. We've
(21:03):
got some quotes from him. We we'll give it if
it a few. That guy's name was Alex and he
didn't want to do that. He refused to put up
to put up the curtain, and he set the two
he called him compasses, set them up in the same room.
This was on October two, eighteen fifty. The experiment goes ahead.
Remember the journalist is also under the spell of Ben
(21:25):
Wah because he's an occultist. I thought of that earlier.
That's terrible anyhow, I think anyhow, the he's got Alex
here touching snails two letters on one device to talk
to ben Wah through the other device, and ben wa
is going back and forth between these two boards. His
(21:45):
communication is not separate because he's quote unquote making sure
everybody's reading the snails correctly and touching them the right way.
But the transmission they do end up with is still
woefully inaccurate. Yeah, believe that the word was supposed to
be jim NAIs and it somehow ended up being like jemmote,
(22:06):
which is I guess you could. You could. It's sort
of the equivalent of like fat finger texting, you know, um,
but woefully inaccurate. But for some reason, Alex you know,
being what you would think a clever guy as a journalist.
And the skeptic was still really taken in by this,
even the like pretty poor showing that they did, And
(22:27):
he had this to say when he wrote about it
on October sevent of eighteen fifty. He says, we cannot
penetrate the decrees of providence. We must nevertheless hope that
this will not always be so. He basically goes on
to kind of predict the internet here, which I love,
and that thanks to the very discovery of messairs Benoit
and bea. With men now able to better listen to
(22:49):
and understand one another, the sacrifices of inventors will not
have been in vain. That they will, on the contrary,
be able to enjoy during their lives the glory and
the honors that until now have only been accorded to
their memories. So yeah, the journalist Alex is still as
he said, taken in. However, the wealthy benefactor, the manager
(23:12):
of this gymnasium triop, is not. He's an angel investor
who feels like his money has been squandered. He's not
quite ready to give up. He says, we need a
second test with some kind of scientific rigor so we
could actually prove something, and ben Wa agrees. But on
the day they set for this second trial, he's vanished.
(23:33):
He's amos, he's left town, he's off the grid. He
dies penniless in Paris in eighteen fifty two. And then
we see like this, if we go back to the
article you quoted Nol, that La Press article, it was
written before bin Wa disappeared, and it's got all the
(23:55):
bells and whistles, it's got all the flash, it's kind
of like what we would call advtar o real today's
advertising disguised as a piece of editorial content. Yeah, I mean, yes,
I completely agree. I just seemed like he was really
enamored by this dude, and he's just like really big
upping his whole thing. And uh, you know, but again
(24:16):
he he is, like I said, and that quote almost
predicting the uh how important you know, global communication would
would ultimately become um and network, like I said, somewhat
resembling the Internet miniaturization. He predicted that. Um, so you're right,
Ben pin Wise now dead surprise, that's sort of a twist.
(24:38):
He you know, he no longer is the protagonist of
our story. In fact, Alex kind of becomes the one
who carries the torch of the snail telegraph. Um. He
has become kind of a laughing stock over the years.
He's mocked in all these like satirical cartoons and Punch magazine,
which is a really excellent satire magazine out of France.
But he was undeterred. He's still held on to the
(25:01):
hope that this snail telegraph could be a thing, despite
it clearly being sort of the work of I don't know,
do you think Benwir really believed it, Ben, or do
you think he was just trying to build people? And
he was a bit of a huckster. He certainly had,
like you said, it was able to kind of charm
and bewitch people with his occultist ways. But like, do
you think he believed or was he just trying to
(25:22):
put one over on people? It's tough. It's tough to say.
So we know Alex Stephanie believe, but it's tough to
you know, divine Ben was real, like his the level
of his sincerity. He definitely went through with that first experiment,
like he built the thing and tried to make it work,
(25:43):
but he didn't. He didn't appear for that second experiment. Still,
the journalist Alex doesn't give up. In fact, he like
twenty years later, he tries to give it one more go.
In eighteen seventy one, on the barricades the Paris Commune
during the Uprising, people needed to figure out a way
(26:04):
to communicate discreetly, the way that protesters would use things
like signal in the modern day. And so there's a
guy named Marquis Rochefort who is the president of the
Barricades Commission who thinks about Alex's story, and he says, well,
maybe we can try this again. So they try this
(26:25):
snail telegram again, and unfortunately, as Atlas Obscura puts it,
the snie telegram proved to be no more effective in
eighteen seventy one than in eighteen fifty and it failed
to save the Communards from massacre and exile. So so yeah,
at this point we've kind of ended the lifespan of
the snail telegraph. And by now I think the original
(26:47):
snails would have been long dead. I think, well it's
a fifteen years now. He would have been dead for
about five years at this point, the longest lasting of them.
And we see it replaced by you know, more science
e things, actual telegraphs that really worked and you know,
required infrastructure and not just vibes, though we do love vibes.
It's just it's a it's a film for the whole family.
(27:08):
You know, surely this is our advertorial for vibes. That's
that's the way of the show. And you know, lest
we be too harsh on Benoir, there is something to
be said for boldly going where no one's gone before
in terms of invention, right, and trying something new. So
(27:30):
while I applaud the go get itiveness of it, right,
I understand, you know, not all ideas are gonna make
it off the drawing board, and not all ideas should. Still,
if you're a fan of snails, then you're probably happy
to hear that the snail telegraph never got off the
(27:50):
ground because all those creatures that fascinate you are living
lives free of being glued to zinc bowls, thank god.
And you know, snales actually are much more fascinating creatures,
and I would have ever given them credit for like,
for example, they are very closely related to slugs, but
I would argue slightly less gross. The slug is just
(28:11):
like a snail with no shell. And they're also really
closely related to shellfish. Um that you know, their their mollusks,
you know they live their sea snails. You know, there
are a lot like oysters or clams or or muscles. Right,
they have a lot of amazing medical uses. I think
that's one of the biggest contributions they make to science.
They inspired medical adhesives. UH studies find that snail mucus
(28:35):
in fact might be helpful in assisting the healing process
for wounds, like putting it on your skin may trigger
an immune response that inspires those cells to regenerate. So cool,
and like we said before, pretty impressive lifespan on a
snail two to seven years and in captivity again that
can be more like ten to fifteen. Who knew? You
(28:58):
probably already knew because we mentioned that one before. But
really cool creatures, really cool story bad. This was a
fun conversation, agreed, agreed, And you know, like slugs, we
hope that you enjoy finding this episode of Ridiculous History
anywhere on the Earth. We don't have a hundred and
fifty thousand episodes yet, that's the number of species of gastropods,
(29:23):
but we are going to try to get there, and
we're gonna do so with the help of our super producers.
So big thanks to Casey Pegram, big thanks to Max Williams,
and of course, no big, big thanks to you, oh Man.
Thanks to Christopher Haciotes here in spirit, Alex Williams who
composed this theme, Jonathan Strick aka the Quister that you
will be seeing him darkening our our doorstep again one
(29:44):
of these days soon. But you know what I like.
I like a banana slug. That's my favorite species of slug.
I like them all man. I used to have some
pet slugs Jimmish salt slugs. Are you one of those
kids now? Of course you aren't. You're you're you're a
lover of all all creatures, great and small. We'll see
you next time. Books, m hmmm. For more podcasts from
(30:08):
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer,
the one and only Mr Max Williams. They called me Ben,
and like a lot of human beings, I'm you know,
I'm I'm all about talking to people. That's funny because
it's not necessarily true sort of our job. I mean,
(00:48):
we'd sort of talk to people professionally, I guess you
could say, and in a weird bubble they don't talk back.
They do sometimes via email or you know me and
iTunes reviews, but in general we're professional communicators. Ben. Have
you ever reading Escargo Dona? Yeah, I got some in
my kitchen right now. Actually in a can, isn't that cool.
(01:10):
It's the one canned food that I think is actually
pretty gourmet. There are other gourmet can foods, but that's
really the only way to get snails is in a can.
I grew up in Germany, and uh, it was just
like a thing that I grew up eating. And I
think I took a friend of mine when I was
a little kid to a like a French restaurant and
we got scar go and he tried one. I thought
it was the most disgusting thing in the world. He
(01:32):
described it as like eating a chewy you know, ball
of snot or something like them. And your knowl And
today we are talking about snails, but maybe not in
the way you expect. Well, we'll touch on s cargo
here and there, but stales. Stales are a pretty common creature.
(01:52):
They're also fascinating. They gross some people out, you know,
some people think of them as moving boogers. They due
to you know, the slime and the way the texture
of their skin is and so on. But what Unearthed
could snails have to do with the idea of communication?
Because Max, Noel and us listening at home, and myself,
(02:15):
we're all pretty lucky to be alive in a time
where there are instantaneous means of communication across the world.
But as we're gonna see today, the idea of a
global communication network is much older than the Internet. In fact,
there was a French occultists in the eighteen fifties who
(02:36):
thought he could build a communication network with get this snails.
M It's true, you knew we were going to get
there somehow. Communications snails French occultists. What else do you want?
I want to be a French occultist. That sounds like
a cool gig um. Now it's true. The guy in
question is one Jacques tous Saint Benoit, whose experiments in
(02:57):
the eighteen fifties with snails lead to something referred to
as a snail telegraph yes or passiolytics sympathetic compass. It's
a little less sexy, but definitely sounds fancy. What is it,
ben What is it? So? Here's the idea in short,
summed up by John Brownley writing for Wired, brown Lee
(03:21):
says bin Wa is convinced that any two snails that
have hooked up are forever in telepathic contact for the
rest of their life, regardless of the distance between them
and to him. This means that if you touch one,
then the other one the mate will move. And so,
based on this concept, and Wa makes some gadgets. Wired
(03:45):
calls them contraptions. They're essentially like picture twenty four snails
glued to the bottom of a bowl, and each of
them is in bas design representative of a letter of
the alphabet. And there, yes, you're right, folks, there are
two missing letters. We'll get to those in a bit. Wait,
so glued to the bottom of a bowl with letters
(04:07):
on the top, sort of like a weird snail typewriter. Yes, yeah,
and weird and weirdly incomplete snail typewriter. Sounds like some
flint stones gadgetry right there. Yeah, And he was convinced
that you could you know, touch letters, key in letters.
Let's just say on one set of snails and the
other set of snails, however far away they might be,
(04:28):
would move so that the person on the other end
of the gadget could you know, decode whatever message you
were intending to send. Yeah, a stalelegraph, which is weird
because we call conventional mail snail mail now, but this
snail legraph was if it worked, it would be much
faster than a telegraph of the type. Right, So at
(04:51):
this point Ben was trying to do the telegraph version
of building a better mouse trap. The telegraph is already around,
and when we look at the modern day, what we
see is is pretty amazing, Like, no matter where we
are now in the world, and we've learned this recording
(05:12):
this podcast on the road, and during a pandemic, no
matter where we are, we can use various platforms to
communicate with each other to even record our show. And
that's a really recent development in the you know, in
the history of humanity. But it's something that has its
origins in pretty basic scientific principles. And as Smithsonian mag
(05:35):
points out, these were first manifests in the good old
eighteenth century electric telegraph, you know, dits and dashes. We
talked about this in the past. The story behind Morse
code is really sad. Oh god man, it's been so long.
I forget the sad part. Well, the the death of
Samuel Morse's wife was the real impetus or inspiration which
(05:57):
work of the telegraph got it? Well, thankfully. I don't
think any tragedy led into ben Wa coming up with this, uh,
this snail legraph. I think it was more perseverance and
cookie stick to itiveness. Really interesting. So he believed that
these snails could transmit like sympathetic current, isn't that right?
(06:18):
I mean it was some form of like electrical transmission.
I mean we would look at it is almost like telepathy, right,
essentially is what he's describing. But you know, he tried
to describe it in more scientific terms. But again, the
guy was like kind of a mystic. I mean occultist,
and apparently, I mean it makes sense. There's a really
great article in Gizmoto, the man who tried to have
been a telegraph made out of telepathic snails. It's a
(06:40):
mouthful of the headline by Esther ingliss Arkle. The eighteen
hundreds were a really like golden time to be an occultist. Uh.
It was sort of like the swing of the pendulum
in the other direction. After years and years of witch
burning and fearing the devil and seeing his evil lurking
around every corner, it became kind of a time where
(07:00):
paranormal exploration and magic and kind of the combination of
science and magic were very popular. Uh. And there was
a lot of belief even in just kind of regular
old folks in sciences and like the efficacy of sciences
and um looking into things like fairies and gnomes and
all of that. And ben Wah was squarely in this camp.
(07:23):
So while he, you know, it does attempt to explain
the snail phenomenon in relatively scientific terms, comparing it to
the telegraph, he clearly was coming at it from a
place of kind of you know, a weird ephemeral mysticism
as well. Yeah. Yeah. To be very clear about it,
(07:49):
ben Wah was not a scientist per se. But ben
Wah also wasn't a wealthy eccentric. So this meant that
because he didn't have a ton of cash and he
didn't have a ton of rigorous research, that he needed
to convince other people to help him. He needed help
(08:10):
funding this idea. But before you get to that, let's
dive into what he thought was going on. So as
you said, no, he believed there was some sort of
sympathetic bond or current between snails, like after they hooked up,
basically after they made it, and he believed, Ben, have
you seen snails mating like our up close video, like
(08:32):
in any nature documentaries of snails mating? I believe I
have in the past, but it's it's not one of
my go to YouTube clips. It's it's it's not nor
should it be, and it's something to be whole. The
owners never bring it up. Is because there's a really
cool movie by our documentary by a French filmmaker whose
name is Escaping Me but also did the film Winged Migration,
and it's called Microcosmos, and it's like all this amazing
(08:54):
kind of macro photography of like insects, and one of
the scenes airs like these snails just going at it
or they like to become one. They're like writhing together
and make this weird Georgia O'Keefe looking array while this
like gorgeous opera music is playing in the background, and
it's simultaneously kind of beautiful and kind of hilarious because
(09:16):
it looks ridiculous but also like very psychedelic and strange,
and the music is really sets it off. But I'm sorry,
I please you guys. Had to bring up snails mating.
It's something to see. Check out that clip. It's on YouTube.
So ben wal obviously was watching stales mate and as
I was saying, he believed that this mating process resulted
in an exchange of what he called sympathetic fluids, and
(09:39):
that the exchange of these fluids connected these snails in
a way that made them mentally inseparable. He thought of
it as an invisible an invisible string, something between a
string and fluid that emanated from one snail to the other,
a kind of natural telegraph cable. But this provided instant communication,
(10:05):
in his mind, regardless of the environment between them. So
you can put them on ocean away. It wouldn't matter.
One could be on a mountain, one could be in
a deep cavern. They would still be able to have
that vibe with each other and the way you know,
and these are snails, so we can't ask them to say,
guess a number or sing a song, right. Instead, he
(10:27):
just has to physically stimulate them. Yeah, like either by
poking them like we said, like literally tapping them like
a weird snail typewriter, or shooting them with a little
electric current that to do it. And he referred to
this phenomenon this kind of like sympathetic psychic connection with
these fluids. I don't understand how fluids interact with each other,
(10:48):
that fluids caner would travel through. I guess that's true.
It's true that we just don't understand. I can't wrap
our heads around. He termed this phenomenon scar gotic commotion,
which I just love. I'm gonna start using that in
uh in my regular conversation or maybe start a band
called escargotic commotion. Either way, this was the basis of
this whole thing. He considered this to be against said
(11:11):
this amazing obscure article. He considered this to be some
sort of evolutionary loophole, and he really believed in this phenomenon.
He had a partner as well, an American, which is weird,
who has a very French sounding name monsieur bia creti
um Americans somehow though, yeah, yeah, this is This is
(11:32):
interesting though, because some researchers believe that ben Wa made
this guy up like out of whole cloth. He never
was another person for him to to communicate with, or
maybe he was embellishing his story a little bit, but yes,
he said he had a partner. He also didn't just
(11:55):
see some snails mating and thought I should try to
turn these guys into the alphabet instead. He was building
off this earlier concept that's very hr Geiger as a
phrase flesh telegraphs. This goes back to the fifteen hundreds,
but then also earlier, just a few decades earlier. In
eighteen thirty nine, a guy named William O'Shaughnessy, an Irish
(12:19):
doctor and a fan of marijuana, had experimented with the
idea of using human skin to transmit and receive electrical signals.
Which is interesting because we know that that is a thing.
I mean, that's the reason. For example, like touch lamps work,
and like touch screens, you know, like there is some
(12:40):
connectivity between you know, we have a glove on, the
screen is not gonna work. You have a glove on,
like you know, one of those touch lamps isn't gonna work.
So it is about kind of using the human body
as a conduit for these types of signals. I mean,
it's like it's not like a current that's gonna shock you,
but we do know that the human body can transmit
these kinds of impulses. Yeah, vibes. It's not just an
(13:01):
amazing film. Uh sorry, Jeff Goldblum and one of our
favorites here on Ridiculous History. It really is quite a banger.
I highly recommend checking it out. You mentioned hundreds. But
in the Dred the Flesh Telegraph, I guess that we're
kind of being kicked around then involved fish. Yeah, yeah,
that's that is true. It's strange because everybody was trying
(13:24):
to at various points create some communication device like this,
and I think it tells us something illuminating about the
human condition. Since before the dawn of recorded history, people
were obsessed with trying to talk with one another, you
know what I mean, Like in general, So it makes
sense that people would try to find novel solutions to
(13:45):
the old problem of communication over distance, whether it's fish,
whether it's snails, whether it's human flesh. They were just
we're saying, they were throwing a lot of stuff at
the wall. Here can we can we address the elephant
in the room or the massive dead snail in the room.
The longevity of this does not really compute for me, Like,
(14:07):
you know, how you gotta keep replacing snails. I mean,
what do you used to if you feed them, it's
like it's like having a pet, It's like maintaining an aquarium.
I guess you can keep alive for a long time.
But like, first of all, when I first heard this,
I'm picturing snails lined up back to back to back
to back to back, like over a long, long distances,
like literally a snail telegraph. But again, these were supposedly,
you know, psychic snails, So I guess you only have
(14:30):
to have about twenty five of them on each end
for for the alphabet, so you know you have one died,
but then you have to make them again. It just
seems like a whole homework assignment to me. Yeah, because
you'd have to be based on the lifetime of the snails.
You'd have to be constantly ready to ship out a
new receiver to whatever remote, remote location the other receiver
(14:50):
was originally at, and that's every time a snail passes away.
It's also like, I guess people could, if this worked,
save money by just using these keyboards for as long
as they could, but it be like typing with a
broken typewriter. Eventually you'd start missing really important letters like
E or some or some other vowel. Oh, you know,
(15:12):
the LFE cycle of a snail is actually longer than
I thought. Apparently in the while they can live two
to seven years, but in captivity they can actually live
ten to fifteen years or even longer if they're like,
you know, properly fed and watered. So okay, I retract
my my beef, but there are there are a copious
other beefs to be had with this situation. Yeah, but
(15:33):
I I don't think you necessarily should, because you'd still
the point remains, you'd still have to cycle it out,
maybe just not as often as some might assume. But look,
they need help, they need credibility, and they need cash.
This pair of people represented by Ben Wah, so Ben
(15:54):
Wah starts putting the charm on this guy who manages
a gymnaisi him in Paris. His name is Monsieur try It,
and he convinces this dude to let him live, like
to pay for him to live somewhere and give him
a stipend to work on his snail telegraph. He also
(16:16):
beguiles a journalist named Jules Alex from La Press and
he gets him to like cover the unveiling of the staleygraph,
and so he sort of stages an event, right, He
does this sort of unveiling thing on October two of
(16:38):
eighteen fifty. And this is all at the behest of Triat,
who very much wants to I guess, get his money's
worth from his investment. Um. So at this point the
design of the snail agram consists of like a scaffold
situation using it was like a ten foot beam with
these zinc bowls. I don't know why I needed to
(17:01):
be zinc. Maybe because of don't he probably had his reasons.
The zinc is, I know, very conductive. With the snails
glued using copper sulfate, I can't and I think I
feel like we're burying the leads here. This doesn't seem
very friendly to the snails, not that like you know snails.
I mean, if snails have feelings, right, I think this
would be terrible. This reminds me of the way fleas
were treated in those really messed up maccab flea circus
(17:24):
as we talked about with with Gabe. Or turnspit dogs,
you know, I think would be another example. Yeah, the
snails well being isn't isn't really entering into Benwa's calculations,
and the contraption becomes increasingly complex and increasingly expensive as
they dive into it. Eventually they end up with, as
(17:46):
we said, forty eight snails overall, twenty four separate couplings
into those zinc bowls. They're glued on this wooden board
next to these alphabet symbols. We said earlier there were
inte four snails, but not twinning six. That's because this
is in French, and in French the letters W and
K are often only used for words that are loaned
(18:10):
from other languages, and that's where the author of this
post on the Generalist Academy says, that's where the discrepancy
comes from. Like they it would have been seen as
somewhat extraneous to have that W and K. Also also
patently less French, you know, because I mean the French
take their language very seriously, so they were not even
(18:32):
they like, throw those letters out. We don't use those
except for those trash American words. Who needs them? Get
rid of them? Right. So there's another thing that I
think stood out to a lot of folks who are
listening along at home. It's this, how do you know
you have a positive connection? Right? Like if somebody pokes
(18:53):
the snail that represents the letter B, and then someone
else on the other board is looking at that snail,
what counts as a signal that someone mashed B? It's
unfortunately it's kind of interpretive. I would assume it just
goes bing, you know, or a little green light lights
up on the snail's head on its little tentacles. No,
it does have to do with the tentacles. They're not
(19:14):
what do you call those things there? And yeah, there
are tentacles. They're kind of antennae meet tentacles, the little
you know, wiggly things on their heads. Uh. And that
is how you gauged it, or at least how he
claimed you could gauge it. If you tap a snail
on one of the ends, the corresponding mated snail on
the other end would wiggle its tentacles sympathetically. Yeah, before
(19:37):
it counts as a wiggle. How do you differentiate that from,
you know, a regular stale wiggle, just like a stale
can adjusting snails are always always pretty wiggly, if you
ask me, Um, those little tentacles are always kind of
flopping around willy nilly. So that's the basic idea. And
he attempts to demonstrate this, like we said, of this, Uh,
I guess you'd call it like a press conference really,
(19:58):
but it doesn't go very well. He's been kind of
stringing Tria along right this whole time. He claimed that
he had been in communication with his maybe imaginary friend.
I've got a research partner. You wouldn't know him. He
goes to another wouldn't he go to He lives in Canada, uh,
and goes to the school. So this is he was
He had never this guy had never actually seen it
(20:20):
function correctly. So this trial is not only to maybe
attract other investors and make a splash in the press,
it's also literally at the insistence of this investor who's like,
come on, you know, put your money where your mouth
is or my money where your snails mouths are. Uh.
And it didn't really go very well. Ben while was
very kind of cag right, like he you know, he
(20:43):
he would think Tria wanted to really push home this
thing worked, that there was no trickery at work, right,
So he asked if he would put a curtain up
between him and his partner that he was communicating with,
who wasn't be out by the way, right. It was
just like some assistant. It was the journalist from earlier,
that's right, who was taken by this whole thing. We've
(21:03):
got some quotes from him. We we'll give it if
it a few. That guy's name was Alex and he
didn't want to do that. He refused to put up
to put up the curtain, and he set the two
he called him compasses, set them up in the same room.
This was on October two, eighteen fifty. The experiment goes ahead.
Remember the journalist is also under the spell of Ben
(21:25):
Wah because he's an occultist. I thought of that earlier.
That's terrible anyhow, I think anyhow, the he's got Alex
here touching snails two letters on one device to talk
to ben Wah through the other device, and ben wa
is going back and forth between these two boards. His
(21:45):
communication is not separate because he's quote unquote making sure
everybody's reading the snails correctly and touching them the right way.
But the transmission they do end up with is still
woefully inaccurate. Yeah, believe that the word was supposed to
be jim NAIs and it somehow ended up being like jemmote,
(22:06):
which is I guess you could. You could. It's sort
of the equivalent of like fat finger texting, you know, um,
but woefully inaccurate. But for some reason, Alex you know,
being what you would think a clever guy as a journalist.
And the skeptic was still really taken in by this,
even the like pretty poor showing that they did, And
(22:27):
he had this to say when he wrote about it
on October sevent of eighteen fifty. He says, we cannot
penetrate the decrees of providence. We must nevertheless hope that
this will not always be so. He basically goes on
to kind of predict the internet here, which I love,
and that thanks to the very discovery of messairs Benoit
and bea. With men now able to better listen to
(22:49):
and understand one another, the sacrifices of inventors will not
have been in vain. That they will, on the contrary,
be able to enjoy during their lives the glory and
the honors that until now have only been accorded to
their memories. So yeah, the journalist Alex is still as
he said, taken in. However, the wealthy benefactor, the manager
(23:12):
of this gymnasium triop, is not. He's an angel investor
who feels like his money has been squandered. He's not
quite ready to give up. He says, we need a
second test with some kind of scientific rigor so we
could actually prove something, and ben Wa agrees. But on
the day they set for this second trial, he's vanished.
(23:33):
He's amos, he's left town, he's off the grid. He
dies penniless in Paris in eighteen fifty two. And then
we see like this, if we go back to the
article you quoted Nol, that La Press article, it was
written before bin Wa disappeared, and it's got all the
(23:55):
bells and whistles, it's got all the flash, it's kind
of like what we would call advtar o real today's
advertising disguised as a piece of editorial content. Yeah, I mean, yes,
I completely agree. I just seemed like he was really
enamored by this dude, and he's just like really big
upping his whole thing. And uh, you know, but again
(24:16):
he he is, like I said, and that quote almost
predicting the uh how important you know, global communication would
would ultimately become um and network, like I said, somewhat
resembling the Internet miniaturization. He predicted that. Um, so you're right,
Ben pin Wise now dead surprise, that's sort of a twist.
(24:38):
He you know, he no longer is the protagonist of
our story. In fact, Alex kind of becomes the one
who carries the torch of the snail telegraph. Um. He
has become kind of a laughing stock over the years.
He's mocked in all these like satirical cartoons and Punch magazine,
which is a really excellent satire magazine out of France.
But he was undeterred. He's still held on to the
(25:01):
hope that this snail telegraph could be a thing, despite
it clearly being sort of the work of I don't know,
do you think Benwir really believed it, Ben, or do
you think he was just trying to build people? And
he was a bit of a huckster. He certainly had,
like you said, it was able to kind of charm
and bewitch people with his occultist ways. But like, do
you think he believed or was he just trying to
(25:22):
put one over on people? It's tough. It's tough to say.
So we know Alex Stephanie believe, but it's tough to
you know, divine Ben was real, like his the level
of his sincerity. He definitely went through with that first experiment,
like he built the thing and tried to make it work,
(25:43):
but he didn't. He didn't appear for that second experiment. Still,
the journalist Alex doesn't give up. In fact, he like
twenty years later, he tries to give it one more go.
In eighteen seventy one, on the barricades the Paris Commune
during the Uprising, people needed to figure out a way
(26:04):
to communicate discreetly, the way that protesters would use things
like signal in the modern day. And so there's a
guy named Marquis Rochefort who is the president of the
Barricades Commission who thinks about Alex's story, and he says, well,
maybe we can try this again. So they try this
(26:25):
snail telegram again, and unfortunately, as Atlas Obscura puts it,
the snie telegram proved to be no more effective in
eighteen seventy one than in eighteen fifty and it failed
to save the Communards from massacre and exile. So so yeah,
at this point we've kind of ended the lifespan of
the snail telegraph. And by now I think the original
(26:47):
snails would have been long dead. I think, well it's
a fifteen years now. He would have been dead for
about five years at this point, the longest lasting of them.
And we see it replaced by you know, more science
e things, actual telegraphs that really worked and you know,
required infrastructure and not just vibes, though we do love vibes.
It's just it's a it's a film for the whole family.
(27:08):
You know, surely this is our advertorial for vibes. That's
that's the way of the show. And you know, lest
we be too harsh on Benoir, there is something to
be said for boldly going where no one's gone before
in terms of invention, right, and trying something new. So
(27:30):
while I applaud the go get itiveness of it, right,
I understand, you know, not all ideas are gonna make
it off the drawing board, and not all ideas should. Still,
if you're a fan of snails, then you're probably happy
to hear that the snail telegraph never got off the
(27:50):
ground because all those creatures that fascinate you are living
lives free of being glued to zinc bowls, thank god.
And you know, snales actually are much more fascinating creatures,
and I would have ever given them credit for like,
for example, they are very closely related to slugs, but
I would argue slightly less gross. The slug is just
(28:11):
like a snail with no shell. And they're also really
closely related to shellfish. Um that you know, their their mollusks,
you know they live their sea snails. You know, there
are a lot like oysters or clams or or muscles. Right,
they have a lot of amazing medical uses. I think
that's one of the biggest contributions they make to science.
They inspired medical adhesives. UH studies find that snail mucus
(28:35):
in fact might be helpful in assisting the healing process
for wounds, like putting it on your skin may trigger
an immune response that inspires those cells to regenerate. So cool,
and like we said before, pretty impressive lifespan on a
snail two to seven years and in captivity again that
can be more like ten to fifteen. Who knew? You
(28:58):
probably already knew because we mentioned that one before. But
really cool creatures, really cool story bad. This was a
fun conversation, agreed, agreed, And you know, like slugs, we
hope that you enjoy finding this episode of Ridiculous History
anywhere on the Earth. We don't have a hundred and
fifty thousand episodes yet, that's the number of species of gastropods,
(29:23):
but we are going to try to get there, and
we're gonna do so with the help of our super producers.
So big thanks to Casey Pegram, big thanks to Max Williams,
and of course, no big, big thanks to you, oh Man.
Thanks to Christopher Haciotes here in spirit, Alex Williams who
composed this theme, Jonathan Strick aka the Quister that you
will be seeing him darkening our our doorstep again one
(29:44):
of these days soon. But you know what I like.
I like a banana slug. That's my favorite species of slug.
I like them all man. I used to have some
pet slugs Jimmish salt slugs. Are you one of those
kids now? Of course you aren't. You're you're you're a
lover of all all creatures, great and small. We'll see
you next time. Books, m hmmm. For more podcasts from
(30:08):
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.