Studies are lacking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if five percent of the entire world’s Internet bandwidth was dedicated to swapping cat photos. For some reason, cats and Internet go hand in hand, a simple truth that guys like Ben Huh used to get filthy stinking rich. But our obsession with photos of cats in silly poses isn’t anything new.
Sometime in the 1870s, British photographer Harry Pointer made the greatest breakthrough in the history of cat photography. He’d long been shooting carte-de-visite (kind of like a postcard) photos of cats doing cat things — sleeping, drinking milk — but epiphany struck: He started taking shots of cats in a bunch of goofball poses. Even better, he realized he could meme-ify the pictures by adding silly written phrases to his prints. The lolcat was born.
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