You’re Having A Laugh – Part Forty
Jacques Benoit and the snail telegraph, 1851
You’ve heard of snail mail, but what about snail telegraphy? This was the brainwave of Frenchman, Jacques Benoit, an amateur occultist and mesmerist. In 1850 the new electric telegraph seemed to be ushering in a new dawn for communications, but the newly laid cross-Channel line was blighted with problems. The wire casings soon decomposed in water and the salt rendered the all-important wires unusable. Something better was needed.
Benoit was fascinated by something called sympathetic communication, where two organisms with a common bond could communicate with each other, irrespective of distance. He had discovered, or at least so he claimed, that when snails touched each other and then were separated, they developed a telepathic bond such that when one was stimulated, the other responded. Snails, he decided, were going to be the cutting edge of international communications.
There was one little problem, Benoit hadn’t got two centimes to rub together. Fortunately, he bumped into the manager of a Parisian gymnasium, Monsieur Triat, who was enthused by Benoit’s tale, particularly when he revealed that he had been collaborating with a Monsieur Biat-Chretien, based in the States, communicating by snail telegraph, of course. Triat agreed to fund Benoit’s work on perfecting the telegraph, providing him with an apartment and an allowance. Benoit set to work but after a while he seemed distracted and Triat got the distinct impression that his money was funding the inventor’s lifestyle rather than the telegraph. Not surprisingly, after a year or so he demanded to see the machine.
On October 2, 1851 Benoit invited Triat and a journalist, Allix from La Presse, to the grand unveiling of what was called the pasilalinic-sympathetic compass. From a large wooden frame was suspended a large disc with twenty-four holes, each containing a zinc dish lined with a cloth soaked in a copper sulphate solution. Each dish was allocated a letter of the alphabet and inside, glued into place, was a live snail. At the other end of the room was a similar contraption and to transmit a message, the operator would tap the shell of the snail representing the requisite letter and its colleague, sitting in the other compass, would, by sympathetic reaction, react, enabling the recipient of the message to deduce the letter. It would have been a slow process, but we are talking about snails.
The guests immediately objected to the fact that the instruments were in the same room, but Benoit brushed aside their objections, setting their minds at rest that this was how he communicated with his associate in the States. Benoit was positioned at the receiving station but every now and again felt it necessary, on some flimsy pretext or other, to see what Triat was doing. At this point the centime dropped and Triat realised that he had been the victim of a hoax and he demanded a second trial in conditions over which he had complete control. Benoit had no option but to agree.
Allix, though, whether he was part of the plot or not is unclear, wrote a glowing review which appeared in Le Presse on October 27th. “Snails which have once been put in contact, are always in sympathetic communication. When separated, there disengages itself from them a species of fluid of which the earth is the conductor, which develops and unrolls, so to speak, like the almost invisible thread of the spider, [but] the thread of the escargotic fluid is invisible as completely and the pulsation along it as rapid as the electric fluid”.
When the day for the second trial dawned, Benoit was nowhere to be seen. A few months later he was seen wandering around Paris, destitute and deranged, dying two years later. With him went the dream of snail telegraphy, too.
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If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
