How Scientists Turned a Cat Into A Phone
The Cat Telephone Experiment
Cats have comfortable relations with humans. But history has been cruel to cats.
In the middle ages, people used to believe that cats were familiars of witches and responsible for the black plague, triggering millions of cats being slaughtered.
There is a superstition as well, that black cats are unlucky and don’t go forward if black cats cross your path.
And then there was a time when two professors of Princeton University turned an alive cat into a working telephone.
You may have read a lot of weird experiments for the advancement of science. But the Princeton Cat experiment will freak you out.
Let’s read to find out how and why?
The Cat Telephone Experiment
In 1929, Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his assistant Charles William Bray conducted an experiment on a cat at Princeton University.
Wever and Bray took a heavily sedated, but alive, cat and turned it into a telephone to learn about How sound is perceived by the auditory nerve.
First, they opened the sedated cat’s skull to better access the auditory nerve. Second, they connected one side of the telephone wire to the nerve and…