“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.”

—  Albert Einstein

Earliest published version found on Google Books with this phrasing is in the 1993 book The Internet Companion: A Beginner&#x27;s Guide to Global Networking by Tracy L. LaQuey and Jeanne C. Ryer, p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?id=sP5SAAAAMAAJ&amp;q=meowing#search_anchor. However, the quote seems to have been circulating on the internet earlier than this, appearing for example in this post from 1987 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/cc89abb5e065d23f?hl=en and this one from 1985 http://groups.google.com/group/net.sources.games/browse_thread/thread/846af15b5a38c35/3d6d5a639c24bba3. No reference has been found that cites a source in Einstein&#x27;s original writings, and the quote appears to be a variation of an old joke that dates at least as far back as 1866, as discussed in this entry from the &quot;Quote Investigator&quot; blog http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/02/24/telegraph-cat/#more-3387. A variant was told by Thomas Edison, appearing in The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 216 http://books.google.com/books?id=NXtEAAAAIAAJ&amp;q=edinburgh#search_anchor: &quot;When I was a little boy, persistently trying to find out how the telegraph worked and why, the best explanation I ever got was from an old Scotch line repairer who said that if you had a dog like a dachshund long enough to reach from Edinburgh to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he would bark in London. I could understand that. But it was hard to get at what it was that went through the dog or over the wire.&quot; A variant of Edison&#x27;s comment can be found in the 1910 book Edison, His Life and Inventions, Volume 1 by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, p. 53 http://books.google.com/books?id=qN83AAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA53#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false. <br class="br">The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat. <br class="br">Variant, earliest known published version is How to Think Like Einstein by Scott Thorpe (2000), p. 61 http://books.google.com/books?id=9yrYQxBgIYEC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;pg=PA61#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false. Appeared on the internet before that, as in this archived page from 12 October 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/19991012152820/http://stripe.colorado.edu/%7Ejudy/einstein/advice.html <br class="br">Misattributed

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German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi… 1879–1955

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