18. In 1929, researchers from the University of Princeton turned a live cat into a telephone
In 1929, Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his assistant Charles William Bray of Princeton University tested how the auditory nerve perceived sound by turning a live cat into a telephone. The pair sedated the cat and then attached a telephone wire to its exposed auditory nerve. They then connected the wire to a telephone receiver. When Bray spoke through the cat’s ears, Wever, who was with the receiver, fifty feet away in a soundproofed room, found he could hear what his partner was saying. The pair’s experiments led to prestigious scientific careers. As for the cat, while it survived the first experiment, it did not survive Wever and Bray’s subsequent investigations.