There is perhaps no animal on this planet as agile as the common domestic cat. And last but not least, their bag of acrobatic tricks includes one for which they are known: the ability to land safely on their velvet paws if subjected to a fall.
This is not metaphorical, although cats are certainly uniquely capable of escaping all kinds of predicaments. It’s also literal. If you ever see a cat miss a step and plummet, the way it twists its furry body seems nothing short of creepy.
Efforts to demystify this feline superpower began in earnest with the invention of chronophotography, which allowed researchers to take many photos in a short time.
In 1894, French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey published a series of photographs, taken at 12 frames per second, that revealed the process of a cat deftly spinning while falling from a supine position to land perfectly.
In the 1950s, people discovered parabolic flight: the ability to simulate zero-G conditions using specially designed aircraft that crash along a precise flight path. And with that came a devilish thought. What would happen to a cat’s ability to land on its feet if it couldn’t tell the difference between up and down?
So this is what the bright minds at the US Air Force Aerospace Medical Research Lab decided to discover.
Parabolic flight is not true microgravity, but a brief experience of its effect. Just as a quick descent in an elevator can make you feel lighter in your loafers, passengers on an airplane will experience weightlessness as they quickly descend from a high altitude to a lower altitude. It is quite disorienting and it is not without reason that the parabolic flight is nicknamed the ‘vomit comet’.
The first experiments were conducted aboard a Convair C-131 Samaritan, and yes, there is definitely a video of the procedure. A similar experiment involved releasing pigeons into the C-131 during a parabolic flight. People seem to have had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards having eyes.
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It’s fascinating to watch. The story accompanying the video says that the cats’ “automatic reflex action is almost completely lost under weightlessness.” Almost – but not quite. Although the cats appear disoriented, they may still twist their bodies around as they try to figure out where they will fall.
That was far from the end of the experiments. An article from 1957 The Journal of Aviation Medicine documents experimenting with eight kittens in T-33 and F-94 aircraft performing parabolic flights – “not just to satisfy our own curiosity,” wrote Siegfried Gerathewohl and Herbert Stallings of the US Air Force, “but to play the role of the otolith organ. during weightlessness.”
And there are photos of a very uncomfortable looking kitten in the cockpit of a Lockheed F-94C Starfire, taken in 1958.
All this cat-cat shenanigans helped scientists understand cats. In 1969, mechanics Thomas Kane and MP Scher of Stanford University published an analysis in the International Journal of Solids and Structures who described the motion of a falling cat as two cylinders rotating relative to each other to quickly right themselves as they fall.
The research also had consequences for people. The same two scientists also wrote a 1969 paper for NASA that used mathematical models to better understand the motion and orientation of the human body in free fall.
And in 1968, Kane rustled up a gymnast who, dressed as an astronaut, bounced on a trampoline and tried to imitate the movements of a falling cat. The successful experiment was photographed by Ralph Crane and those photos were published in TO LIVE; and even today astronauts are trained to twist their bodies like cats so they can turn around in microgravity.
That’s just as good. If we had to send cats to do space exploration on Earth’s behalf, who knows what cosmic horrors they would proudly bring home to show us.