Life as we tweet it

How the internet is in us as much as we are in the internet

- ANJULY MATHAI

In 1850, a French man, Jules Allix, published a paper about a remarkable invention that would facilitate “universal and instantaneous communication of thought, at any distance whatsoever”. The invention consisted of two unconnected portable boxes containing metal troughs. And in each of these troughs, a snail. It was based on the premise that two snails that have copulated remain mysteriously bonded throughout their lives through an invisible escargotic fluid.

So, this is how the invention works: When one of the snails in the box, which has copulated with the one in the other box, is manipulated, it causes its partner to move. By manipulating snails in numerous boxes corresponding to the French alphabet, one could relay messages from snails in one set of boxes to their partners in the other set, no matter what the distance between the two sets of boxes was.

Allix promised that, with this device, “all men will be able to correspond instantaneously with one another, at whatsoever distance they are placed, man to man, or several men simultaneously, at every corner of the world, and this without recourse to the conductive wires of electrical communication, but with the sole aid of what is basically a portable machine.”