October 2, 1851: That Hit the Snail on the Head

Jacques Toussaint Benoit was a man with a vision, more specifically a Frenchman with a vision, even more specifically a French wizard who had a vision that involved snails. You might call him a snail whisperer. And on October 2, 1851, he set about proving his theory of the telepathic power of these cunning little gastropods.

Benoit believed that when snails mated, they didn’t just fool around, but rather they created an invisible thread that linked them together in a sort of “sympathetic communication,” allowing them to have conversations even at great distances. Instantly. Wirelessly.

Benoit had constructed an apparatus to which he gave the snappy name pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, known more familiarly as a snail telegraph. Long wooden beams supported zinc bowls lined with cloth soaked in copper sulphate — 24 pairs. Snails were glued to the bottom of each bowl. Snails in the first 24 bowls were each assigned a letter of the alphabet; in the second 24 bowls, their significant others had the same letter of the alphabet. To send a message, one would tap it out on the first set of snails and it would be received by the second set of snails. Simplicity itself.

On the day of the great demonstration before Benoit’s one financial backer and a journalist, Benoit ran back and forth between the sender and receiver just to make sure they were touching and reading the snails correctly. A message was sent and received (although it was full of typos). Benoit’s backer suspected a hoax. He demanded a second test.

On the scheduled day of the second test, Benoit was nowhere to be found. He was spotted occasionally wandering the rues of Paris during the next two years before his death. Nobody continued his work.

Maybe If These Guys Had Had Snails

It took a couple of thousand years for us terrestrials to take aviation from a crazy notion to the reality of that flight in Kitty Hawk in 1903. It took less than seven years for these flying contraptions to start bumping into each other. The first mid-air collision took place on October 2, 1910, in Milan, Italy. There you go smirking about those crazy Italians, but one plane had an English pilot, the other French. They didn’t really walk away from the encounter, but both men survived.

How He Got in My Pajamas I’ll Never Know

Groucho (Julius Henry) Marx was born on October 2, 1890. During his seven-decade career, he was known as a master of quick wit and rapid-fire, impromptu patter, frequently filled with innuendo.  He made 26 movies, 13 of them with his brothers Chico and Harpo, and many with Margaret Dumont as a stuffy dowager and the butt of Groucho’s jokes. The films included such comedy classics as The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Day at the Races, and A Night at the Opera. He also had a successful solo career, most notably as the host of the radio and television game show You Bet Your Life.