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