Cats may not actually have nine lives, but Unsinkable Sam proved he definitely had more
than one. As the story goes, The black and white cat was aboard a German battleship called the Bismarck that
Allied forces sank in May of 1941. Sam somehow survived, and later found himself
aboard the HMS Cossack, a British ship. That vessel was then torpedoed by a German U-Boat,
but the feisty feline again made it out alive. Sam had miraculously lived through
two shipwrecks in just five months—and there was still another to come. In November 1941,
the cat was aboard the HMS Ark Royal, an aircraft carrier, when it, too, was torpedoed. Sam was
found during the rescue efforts, and was said to have been “angry but quite unharmed.” He later
retired from military service and spent his final years living safely on land.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, host of the List Show, and Unsinkable Sam is just one of history’s
coolest cats we’ll be covering today. This list isn’t comprehensive, and it’s not ranked,
because in both cases, Pearl and Olly would be on here, and they would be number one.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get started.
Unsinkable Sam wasn’t the only cat with a storied military past. Able Seacat Simon was a
black-and-white cat who served on the HMS Amethyst in 1948 when the British vessel was in Hong Kong.
While the ship was enroute to guard the British Embassy during the Chinese Communist Revolution,
the People’s Liberation Army attacked and the Amethyst ran aground. Simon was injured during
the assault. But that didn’t stop him from playing an important role during the 101-day
long siege. He kept the ship’s rat population at bay, preventing the rodents from devouring the
limited food supply. After the siege ended and the crew returned to England, Simon was awarded
the Dickin Medal for animal bravery. He’s the only cat to have ever received that honor.
Not all cats who served their country did so in the military. Though there were probably
cats prowling around the White House prior to the 19th century, the historic mansion didn’t
get its first official First Cats until Abraham Lincoln took office. The president was gifted
two kittens from Secretary of State William Seward. He became smitten with the kittens,
naming them Tabby and Dixie. The two cats lived very luxurious lives and were held in high regard:
Lincoln once let Tabby dine at the table during a formal dinner,
and he reportedly remarked that Dixie was “smarter than his whole cabinet.”
Félicette went where no cat had ever gone before: outer space. She was one of several street cats
chosen for France’s France's Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique (CERMA)
training program. Félicette was put through a rigorous training program and ultimately
came out on top. In October 1963, she was strapped inside a rocket and sent into space,
going about 100 miles above the planet’s surface. Fifteen minutes later, her capsule detached from
the rocket as planned and she parachuted safely back to Earth. Sadly, Félicette was
killed a few months after her historic journey into the atmosphere so researchers could study
how space travel affected her brain. In 2020, a memorial was finally erected in her honor.
Chester’s contributions to science were a lot less deadly. He’s the co-author of
a very influential physics paper—though he didn’t actually do any work. Michigan
State University physics professor Jack Hetherington wrote a paper about atomic
behavior that wound up getting published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 1975.
Hetherington realized he had used “we” rather than “I” throughout the paper, even though he was its
only author. Rather than go through and make the edits, he simply tacked on another author:
F.D.C. Willard, who was really Chester. F.D.C. stood for Felix Domesticus, Chester; Willard was
the cat’s dad. Hetheringon’s deceit didn’t stay a secret for long, but people weren’t mad: “Everyone
laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag,” he said. Chester was the sole author of a paper
about solid helium that was published in a French popular science magazine in 1980, again under the
name F.D.C. Willard. He was also invited to join Michigan State University’s physics department.
As the department chair wrote in a letter, “Can you imagine the universal jubilation if in fact
Willard could be persuaded to join us, even if only as a Visiting Distinguished Professor?”
Mačak is another cat science owes a debt of gratitude to. He was the childhood pet of Nikola
Tesla. The famous scientist loved Mačak, even calling him “the finest cat in the world.” In
addition to being a loyal companion, the cat quite literally sparked Tesla’s interest in electricity.
As Tesla recalled in an essay, “In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked Mačak’s back,
I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Mačak’s back was a sheet of light
and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” His
father explained that electricity was to blame. But Tesla continued to ponder the incident:
“I was thinking abstractedly,” he wrote. “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its
back?” Tesla carried that curiosity with him for decades to come in his work with electric power.
Cool cats didn’t just influence science. Some left their pawprints in the arts as
well. After the 19th-century artist Louis Wain’s wife, Emily, became sick from breast cancer,
he adopted a kitten named Peter. He’d sketch Emily and Peter as they played together. Wain realized
he liked drawing cats and continued to incorporate them into his art. The felines
in his illustrations grew more anthropomorphic as time went on. They played games, got drunk,
and did all sorts of human activities. Wain’s cat drawings were a huge hit in Victorian England.
Cats have been inspiring writers for centuries. One ninth-century Irish monk penned a poem about
his beloved pet, a white cat named Pangur Bán. The poem was written in Old Irish,
though it has been translated many times. Based on what the monk wrote
about Pangur Bán, we know he was both playful and a keen hunter.
Calvin was a Maltese cat who wandered into author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home
and never left. He often lingered by her while she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at times perching
on her shoulder. When Stowe moved to Florida for the winter, she sent Calvin to her friend
Charles Dudley Warner. The cat left a great mark on Warner. After Calvin died, Warner wrote a long,
touching obituary that he included in his book My Summer in a Garden. “CALVIN is dead. His life,
long to him, but short for the rest of us, was not marked by startling adventures, but his character
was so uncommon and his qualities were so worthy of imitation, that I have been asked by those who
personally knew him to set down my recollections of his career,” the obituary began. Warner went
on to remark that Calvin “had absolutely no bad habits, and his disposition was perfect.”
Mark Twain’s daughter Clara Clemens smuggled a black kitten into the
sanatorium she was staying in. The cat, who she named Bambino,
was her companion during an otherwise lonely stretch of time. But after Bambino nearly gave
one anti-cat resident what Clara referred to as “a cataleptic fit,” she had to get rid of
the cat and gave him to her dad. Bambino was quite clever—according to Mark Twain’s servant,
the author had trained the cat to wash his own face and turn off a lamp on command.
Pepper went from the streets to the silver screen. The Maltese cat was born beneath the
sound stage at Keystone Studios in 1912. It was a fortuitous location:
The actor Mack Sennet found Pepper and included her in the 1913 movie A Little Hero.
She became the first feline movie star, and went on to appear in 16 other films.
In 1984, Koko the gorilla was offered the ultimate gift: a kitten. She chose a gray and white female
cat and named her All Ball, using the modified American sign language she had been taught to use
to communicate with humans. Koko loved spending time with All Ball, and played with her daily.“The
cat reacted to her as she would a human, but she was pretty independent and would bite Koko or
wriggle loose when she got tired of being babied,” Ron Cohn, a biologist who worked with Koko,
once said. Koko was devastated when All Ball died after being run over by a car. When her caretakers
told her about All Ball’s death, Koko whimpered with sadness, then signed the words “Sleep. Cat.”
Here’s a cat who was both cool and pretty chilling. Oscar was one of several therapy cats
at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. He wasn’t the
friendliest therapy cat. But he had an unsettling ability to sense death. Oscar would curl up at a
resident’s side a couple of hours before they died. The staff would pay close attention to
the cat’s whereabouts; if they noticed him spending time with a particular patient,
they would contact that person’s loved ones to let them know death was at the door. We still don’t
know how Oscar knew when people would die. The cat himself passed away in February 2022 at age 17.
​​Creme Puff had an extraordinarily long life. She lived to an astonishing 38 years
old—that’s a solid two decades over the average lifespan of a cat. Creme Puff died in 2005 after
spending decades living in Austin, Texas. She remains the oldest cat ever recorded.
Lil BUB was one of the most famous cats of the 2010s. Though her life was short,
she left behind a lasting legacy. Lil BUB was famous for her adorably unusual appearance. She
had feline dwarfism and osteopetrosis. And though her mobility was limited,
that didn’t stop her from meeting fans and raising awareness for special needs
animals. The cat and her owner raised money for other pets with special needs. Though
Lil BUB died in 2019, an organization called Lil BUB’s Big Fund continues to the cause.
We’ll end with a cat who was the very definition of cool. Tombili was one of
Istanbul’s many street cats, and was beloved by locals—as evidenced by her portly stature.
Tombili liked to lounge around the city’s Ziverbey neighborhood. A photo of her in
her signature pose—slouched to the side and utterly relaxed—catapulted the cat
to internet fame. After Tombili died in 2016, a statue of her was erected within Istanbul.
The memorial was stolen not long after, but it was returned following a large public outcry.
Did we leave out any great cats? Preferably of the historically significant variety? If so,
let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time!