“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
Share this quote
About this quote
This telegraph and cat joke is often attached to Einstein, but the attribution is unsupported and the joke has a much older history. If the page is kept, it should be read as a humorous explanation of distance communication, not as a clean sourced Einstein line.
When to use it
- Use it only in light contexts about analogy, communication, or old technology.
- Do not use it as the basis for an animals category or a serious Einstein science page.
- When attribution matters, keep the Einstein wording cautious because the source trail is weak.