Vibrissae

Welcome to Saturday's most whiskery blog. My word of the week is vibrissae , definition: the stiff, coarse hairs near the mouths of most mammals (and carnivorous birds!), from the Latin vibrio, to  vibrate.

As all cat people (and probably dog people and even carnivorous bird people) know, those whiskers are not just for show, enchantingly handsome though they look...

the cat's whiskers

Cats are by nature long-sighted creatures and have difficulty focussing accurately on anything less than a foot or thirty centimetres away. Their whiskers solve the up-close problem, among several others. Each muzzle whisker (and they have twelve, symmetrically arrayed, on each side of their furry face) is loaded with nerves and at its tip is a sensory organ known as a proprioceptor. Whiskers are also much more deeply embedded in the body than normal fur, as they are connected to the muscular and nervous system. This makes them incredibly sensitive to vibrations and changes in environment. They can act like radar, picking up external information and sending sensory messages to the brain about the cat's surroundings. By this means they enrich the data a cat receives about the world around it, not only by day, but also at night (a key element of its ability to 'see' in the dark).

Thus their whiskers allow them to sense items that are too close to be seen clearly, particulary useful when dealing with prey or when walking along shelves or windowsills loaded with breakable artefacts. Their span is also supposedly a cat's width, allowing kitty to sense whether it can fit into a space or not - and for this reason whiskers should never be trimmed or they lose effectiveness.Cat people can also discern the mood of their cats by the state of their whiskers. Rigid or retracted whiskers denote anxiety, whereas relaxed whiskers (as in the picture above) indicate contentment. And if they are pushed right forward that is a sign of curiosity or analysis.

Making a graceful and calculated leap of subject, when early radio technology was being developed at the outset of the 20th century, and we're talking primitive crystal radio sets here, the fine wires used as part of the mechanism to convert radio waves - vibrations in the air - into audible sound were called cat's whiskers because they looked somewhat similar and performed something of the same information-receiving function. Of course, they were not real cats' whiskers, any more than the catgut used to string tennis rackets came from cats!


early radio - low feline fidelity

Various pioneers in microwave technology, for instance Bose in India, Braun in Germany, by trial and error found that in a device like the one illustrated above in which a crystal (usually galena or iron pyrite) was brought into contact with a vibrating wire (typically copper to begin with, later steel), a semi-conducting junction was formed, a primitive diode with the ability to demodulate the alternating current of radio waves and rectify them into audio modulations that could be heard through earphones (not shown in the diagram).

These early radios worked surprisingly well, requiring little adjustment and no batteries They were cheap to produce and were used widely - though the principle of how they worked only came to be understood in the decades that followed. From the 1900s to the 1930s, these crystal radio sets with their cats' whiskers plucked vibrations from the air to the delight of thousands of early-adopter radio enthusiasts until they were superseded by mains or battery powered valve radios that could provide the amplification that crystal sets lacked.

All of which mulling over vibrissae and crystal sets filled the imaginarium with ideas of cats listening to radios and in all likelihood, if they were real cool kitties, dancing the jellicle night away in that elegant Edwardian decade at the start of the last century.

dancing the night away

Radio Nine Live
Nothing shabby about two Tabbies
gyrating in delight of the moon.

Glossy in joyous, silent pageant,
for so it seems to simple human ears,
these elegant, groomed felines are
dancing the night out on velvet paws
to the swingingest of  party tunes
pulsing invisible through the sky
much like a subtle breeze.

As one, with grace they whirl,
a flash of spat, a fleeting glimpse
of  ribboned, curling tail, and all
their silvery whiskers picking up
on what we cannot hear, the sound
of Nine Live's orchestrated wheeze
vibrating loud and clear.

Thanks for reading. Stay groomed and tuned, S ;-)