People were, happily, just as silly and fluff-headed in the 19th century as they are in these Internet days:
http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/BTNPointerCats.htm
I wonder if there was a Cats That Look Like Napoleon series?
No doubt the telegraph was burning up with transmissions of … --.- …- . . .
Unfortunately, it preceded invention of the cheeseburger so quickly died out.
I like this one. Needs caption, “Visible Velocipede.”
Cats. Cats never change.
Those older pictures lose their charm when you realize that, given the long exposure times for photography in those days, they were using dead cats and posing them with wires.
Yes, that extinguishes the charm quite thoroughly. Gah.
Wait, what? The linked site says they were pictures of his **pet **cats. Were they ex-pet cats? (Or, I suppose, pet ex-cats?)
I feel like this whole thread is in exceedingly high danger of being one huge whoosh going right over my head. Is this real? Are lolcats really 150 years old? Or should I file this with the jackalope and drop bears?
1871 Richard L. Maddox, a British physician, invents the “dry-plate” process, using an emulsion of gelatin, so that photographers did not have to process the pictures immediately. By the late 1870s, exposure time had been reduced to 1/25th of a second. Gelatin emulsion made it possible to produce prints that were larger than the original negatives, allowing manufacturers to reduce the size of cameras.
In the 1870s, Muybridge experimented with instantaneously recording the movements of a galloping horse, first at a Sacramento (California) race track. In June, 1878, he successfully conducted a ‘chronophotography’ experiment in Palo Alto (California) for his wealthy San Francisco benefactor, Leland Stanford, using a multiple series of cameras to record a horse’s gallops - this conclusively proved that all four of the horse’s feet were off the ground at the same time.
Found that online. By the 1870’s, photographs did not need super long exposure times. No reason to think these kitties are dead, unless you can show a cite that proves otherwise.
No I think it was .-.. — .-..
And Muybridge was the guy that the Google Doodle on Monday honored, by animating his famous horse photographs.
Nope, this is for reelz! And the cats are very much alive, as is noted in the text–that is, they were alive in the 1870s. I highly doubt they still are alive, though if so, they probably eat a very restricted diet.
Loved this, thanks!
Harry Pointer’s (the photographer’s) military regiment, the 1st Regiment of the Life Guards, had fought with distinction at the Battle of Waterloo. That was before Pointer was born, but I can imagine they would still have known themselves as “the regiment which guards the monarch, and kicked Napolean’s ass.”
The information on his biography page is interesting. The cat photos were exhibited and sold around the UK, and he won many awards for his animal and nature photography. I’m partial to this one, because though not particularly funny, it shows that neither cats, nor the people who photograph and caption them, have changed remarkably in the intervening time.
This was a question on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me today, in the Bluff The Listener segment. I thought it was a pretty easy guess, but the contestant went for King Arthur boy from the 12th century(!).
But my favorite of the two fake answers was Mo Rocca’s made up story about a coven of witches in Salem, Mass. back in the day who used to provide information on demand on a variety of subjects. He called it
Wicca-pedia!
Roddy
(the topic was things that we think of as internet memes that actually started way before the internet)
You know, for a woman who can’t get her Twats and her Facespaces straight, you sure glommed on to Cheezburger Speek pretty well, Eve 
I picked it up from *you *people!
WAIT, you mean to tell me that cuteness (and, by extension, cute kitties) existed before ME?
My tiny mind is blown!
(Also, Eve, if you ever get Twitter or Facebook, you should totally follow Tweets of Old, as it is awesome and hilarious.)
I got so giddy when I heard this on the show! I was doing the “ooh, ooh, I know this one! Eve posted this!” and glad no one was around to see me! And the caller did eventually pick this as the right answer after being prompted, but I could not believe they even considered the King Arthur thing for a minute!