Imagine that the telegraph is an immense long dog – so long that its head is at Vienna and its tail is at Paris.  Well, tread on its tail, which is at Paris, and it will bark at Vienna.  ~Author unknown, published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1866 August 28distorted over the years as a long cat and for various instruments, but this is the first documented use, see quoteinvestigator.com/2012/02/24/telegraph-cat; variant commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.  (Thanks, Garson O’Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)