CABINET / The Internet of Snails
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Summer 2015
The Internet of Snails
Escargotic commotion and the wood-wide web<br>Justin E. H. Smith
Honoré Daumier, Les escargots non sympathiques, published in Le Charivari, 25 September 1869. Nineteen years after Jules Allix’s article, the trope of “sympathetic snails” had retained enough currency to be used as the title of this cartoon. Where Allix’s sympathetic snails had promised a world of instantaneous communication, the non-sympathetic snails here represent the slow progress of social reforms promised by the Second Empire to workers like the one depicted in Daumier’s drawing.
The snail, class Gastropoda, is noted for a number of exceptional traits. For one thing, it contains a model of the universe in its self-secreted shell: the whorls of hardened mucus instantiate the same logarithmic expansion, sometimes called e, that we see in the spirals of galaxies. For another, some naturalists have observed peculiar powers associated with the snail’s reproductive faculty. They have observed, in particular, a sort of sympathetic bond that endures, across any distance and for the duration of their lives, between any two snails who have once brought their slimy peristaltic rods together in courtship. It has not escaped human curiosity to see whether this bond might be seized upon and used for certain technological applications.
Paris, October 1850. A young man, a former law student and radical candidate for the Constitutional Assembly by the name of Jules Allix, publishes in the feuilleton of La Presse an article describing a new invention.[1] He is not himself the inventor, but is only speaking, he claims, on behalf of his associates, Monsieur Jacques Toussaint Benoît from Hérault near Montpellier, and a man identified only as “Monsieur Biat-Chrétien, the American” (later referred to simply as “Biat”). The discovery is of a “pasilalinic sympathetic compass” that will facilitate “universal and instantaneous communication of thought, at any distance whatsoever.”
In the article, Allix dissimulates, stalls, takes an inordinate amount of time to tell us what this machine actually does. He moves at a leisurely pace through a survey of theological positions on magnetism. The distinguished men of Notre Dame, he tells us, are prepared to see it not as a trick or an illusion, but as the crowning mystery of God’s creation, a constant announcement, in the seeking out of metal by metal, of God’s wisdom and might. If we are prepared to admit gravity, why not other forces too? Why, for example, should we not admit the “galvano-magnetico-mineralo-animalo-adamical sympathy” that governs the pasilalinic sympathetic compass?
Unlike the electrical telegraph, we are eventually told, the compass has no conductive wires, but only two unconnected and portable boxes, each containing a voltaic pile, a wooden or metal wheel ringed with copper sulphate–lined metal troughs. And, in each of these troughs, a snail.
A snail? Allix dwells in excessive detail on irrelevant points, and breezes right past relevant ones. He checks off the most recent scientific shibboleths—Steinheil’s advances in telegraphy in Munich, Matteucci’s in Pisa—and he frontloads the technical terminology like Lieutenant Sulu explaining the impossible physics of warp drive. After a long digression, however, we are offered a bare-bones description of how the machine is to work. Allix explains, first of all, the natural phenomenon, observable only in snails, of “sympathizing,” which is to say of creating an indivisible bond through copulation:
After the separation of the snails that have sympathized together, a sort of fluid is released between them, for which the earth is the conductor, which develops and unfolds, so to speak, like the nearly invisible thread of the spider or that of a...