Princeton researchers Ernest Wever and Charles Bray successfully turned a living, unconscious cat into a fully functional telephone in 1930 to study how the auditory nerve processes sound.

A closer look

Princeton researchers Ernest Wever and Charles Bray successfully turned a living, unconscious cat into a fully functional telephone in 1930 to study how the auditory nerve processes sound. They opened the poor feline's skull, attached one end of a telephone wire to its auditory nerve, and connected the other end to an earpiece located in a completely different soundproof room. When one researcher spoke directly into the cat's ear, the other researcher could perfectly hear the words coming through the telephone receiver, essentially creating the most ethically dubious communication device in scientific history. While they did win prestigious awards for advancing the field of audiology, it is honestly a miracle that modern animal rights organizations have not built a time machine to stop this horrific biological tinkering