Bank of America employees celebrate their merger with MBNA. In song. Integration never sounded so good.

From the footnotes of Eric Larson’s Thunderstruck:

The year 1850 also witnessed one of the strangest attempts at wireless communication. A Frenchman allowed two snails to get to know one another, then shipped one snail off to New York, to a fellow countryman, to test the widely held belief that physical contact between snails set up within them an invisible connection that allowed them to communicate with each other regardless of distance. They placed the snails in metal bowls marked with letters of the alphabet, and claimed that when one snail was touched against a letter, the other snail, at the far side of the ocean, likewise touched that letter. Concluding that somehow signals had been transmitted from one snail to the other, the researchers proposed the existence of an etherlike realm that they called “escargotic fluid.” History is silent on the fate of the snails, though the nationality of the two researchers hints at one possible outcome.