Apr 9, 2012 · 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...

Feb 2, 2010 · A lolcat (usually pronounced LOLL-kat, with the "lol" not being an initialism; sometimes pronounced L-O-L cat) is an image combining a photograph of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic...

Aug 1, 2011 · Today I found out the origin of the lolcat meme. It turns out, the oldest known reference to an lolcat style picture/caption dates all the way back to 1903 from photographer Harry Whittier Frees, who would take photos of small animals, including cats, …

Oct 13, 2013 · In the suffragette campaigns in England, women would go on hunger strikes in prison for the right to vote. The Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act of 1913 let authorities release...

On the Internet, cat memes gained popularity in the mid-2000s, but with this timeline we argue that their origins stretch back to at least the 18th century. Our timeline traces the evolution of cat memes from 18th century emblems through the rise of Internet popular culture.

Mar 4, 2012 · It was way back in the 1870s when British photographer Harry Pointer first stumbled upon the potential for capturing cats doing silly things. He started out taking pictures of his pets in...

Dec 7, 2009 · It has well been established that Harry Whittier Frees predates this by at least 20 years. I would call this an "Early" LOLcat but hardly the first." See the full vintage ad over on the...

Feb 13, 2013 · Lolcats, for those uninitiated in webspeak, is the name given to funny ('lol' or laugh out loud) cat pictures accompanied with an amusing caption imagining what the cat would say, …

In the 1870s a British photographer called Harry Pointer created a series of photographs of cats. To add to the humor of the cat pictures Pointer would often add a funny caption, and thus the first lolcat pictures were born.

Jun 4, 2013 · These photographs were taken by American photographer Harry Whittier Frees (1879–1953), who dressed his cats, Rags and Fluff, as well as the pets of his friends and neighbors, and posed them in human situations with props, often with captions.