Watchlords

In August of 1879, that time of year when most of the postmen in Liege, Belgium took les grandes vacances, the Postmaster had a Grand Idea: Eh parbleu! let's train cats to deliver the mail! http://mentalfloss.com/article/64025/ti ... il-belgium

The precursor of high-speed rail no doubt.

Legend holds that someone of scientific bent, inspired by booze and pharmaceuticals, took a cat and attached a piece of buttered toast to the cat's back.

It's known that toast always lands buttered side down and that cat's always land on their feet. The result of an experiment involving dropping the cat from a meter high resulted in the cat hovering about 100mm in the air, spinning, as the opposing buttered toast and landing feet forces played off each other.

This resulted in the famous Hong Kong to Shanghai bullet train where a buttered cat array was deployed as an inexpensive alternative to super-conducting super-magnets which had to held at close to absolute zero to function. Buttered cats function at room temperature.

But I never knew they delivered the mail.

I had actually heard about the "mail cats of Liege" a while back and was quite surprised to find it true.

It seems the cats were returning to their homes which makes "eventually but in no big hurry" pretty plausible.

How much more efficient might it have been had the good citizens had carrier pigeons rather than cats for pets?