JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today—today, we're falling in many different flavors, and we're at number three.

ROBERT: So next, we have the story of a different kind of fall.

DAVID QUAMMEN: All right.

ROBERT: Or faller.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah.

JAD: Comes from science writer, David Quammen.

ROBERT: One article in particular that he wrote caught our attention.

ROBERT: All right, I'm gonna quote you to yourself.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Okay.

ROBERT: "Nowadays, true enough, we know quite a bit about cats, they've been dissected in uncountable numbers. Their anatomy, their physiology, their behavior have been minutely studied, but there's much that we still don't know. Among all the other intractable issues, one in particular interests me, and that is: what's the terminal velocity of a plummeting cat?

JAD: [laughs] Why—can you give me a little history, why did that question interest you?

DAVID QUAMMEN: I mean, when I used to write for Outside Magazine, I would browse through journals, and I would come across obscure papers. How I happened upon the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, familiarly known as JVAMA ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

DAVID QUAMMEN: ... I don't know. I don't remember. But I'm sure that that was the starting point.

ROBERT: Because it was in that journal that David ran across a research paper ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... by two vets ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Wayne Whitney and Cheryl Mehlhaff.

ROBERT: ... who worked in ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: The Midtown Veterinary Hospital. Right there on Sixth Avenue and 72nd.

ROBERT: And they noticed that in Manhattan ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: There were a lot of cats falling out of windows, high windows, falling off ledges, falling off roofs.

JAD: What—what is a lot? I mean, how many cats were coming into this place?

ANN HOHENHAUS: We saw 132 cats fall in a five-month summer period.

JAD: 132 cats.

ROBERT: That's Ann Hohenhaus. She actually works in the veterinary hospital.

ANN HOHENHAUS: Right here at the Animal Medical Center.

ROBERT: And she's been there since that research paper was written back in 1986.

ANN HOHENHAUS: When I came to New York City, I said, "What do you mean cats fall out of buildings? It doesn't make sense." I said, "Why would the cat fall out?"

ROBERT: But we'll get back to her in just a little bit.

DAVID QUAMMEN: 132 in five months, that's almost a rain of cats.

ROBERT: Well, no, don't say that, because I think people should visit New York without cat-receiving umbrellas.

JAD: Five, eight, two ...

ROBERT: What are you doing?

JAD: I'm doing math to see how many that is in a week of ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

DAVID QUAMMEN: 35 days, it's about—it's about four cats a day, isn't it, Jad?

JAD: Jeez! Actually, I think it's actually a little less. But so falling out of buildings is what—is what this is.

ROBERT: Well, it's a shame we can all agree about that.

JAD: But, according to David, it's actually not as much of a shame as you would think.

DAVID QUAMMEN: 22 of the cats that they saw had fallen from eight stories or higher, and out of those 22, only one died. 21 cats survived from eight stories or higher.

JAD: Wow, that's a long way!

DAVID QUAMMEN: And there was one cat that fell 32 stories, and the cat had a little bit of sort of thoracic bruising and a chipped tooth, and that was it.

JAD: So—I mean, how in the world do cats—I mean, we all know cats land on their feet, yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do they do that? Like, these are not magical creatures.

ROBERT: Well, if you go back about 1,000 years ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: You know, it was thought that they consorted with witches, with the devil, and their reputation got darker and darker. The more people started to distrust and dislike cats, the more they started to do horrible things to them. They would put cats in a barrel, and then they would run the barrel through with swords.

JAD: Oh!

DAVID QUAMMEN: Also, throwing them out of windows, the defenestration of cats.

JAD: What does "defenestration" mean?

ROBERT: Throwing out the window. Fenestra is the window.

JAD: Really? There's a word for that?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Oh Jad, add that to your active vocabulary today.

JAD: I plan to. So what would happen when they would defenestrate these cats?

DAVID QUAMMEN: The cats would land on their feet and walk away, and that made people even crazier!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Now of course, we love our cats now. We don't do that to our cats anymore.

ROBERT: But when we went to visit Ann back at the veterinary hospital, we were asking her about the falling cats research paper, which was called The Feline High-Rise ...

JAD: The Feline High-Rise Syndrome.

ROBERT: Then, the mystery of how cats can fall from these amazing heights and survive, got a lot deeper.

JAD: Yeah.

ANN HOHENHAUS: Well, cats that fell less than five stories ...

ROBERT: They did fine, she said.

ANN HOHENHAUS: ... not too bad. Cats that fell over nine stories ...

ROBERT: They did fine too, she said.

ANN HOHENHAUS: ... not so bad.

JAD: Which is weird.

ROBERT: But ...

ANN HOHENHAUS: Cats that fell between five and nine ...

ROBERT: Between five floors and nine floors ...

ANN HOHENHAUS: ... had really serious injuries, and had more injuries per cat.

JAD: So cats that fell a little ways were okay and cats that fell a long ways were okay, weirdly, but this five to nine thing?

ROBERT: Yeah, how do you account for that?

JAD: Yeah, what is that? What's going on?

ANN HOHENHAUS: So we had to get a physicist to help us explain this.

ROBERT: This is where we get back to what Quammen called ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: The terminal velocity issue.

JAD: Or here's how Ann put it to us ...

ANN HOHENHAUS: Well ...

ROBERT: Say you're living on the 30th floor of a building, and it's summertime.

ANN HOHENHAUS: You get done at work at 5:00, you go home, get there about 6:00. The apartment's hot and stuffy, and you open up those windows, and Fluffy says, "Hmm, I'd like that pigeon out there." And the next thing you know, it's a misstep, and ...

[cat meows]

ANN HOHENHAUS: ... as the cat starts to fall, he's all disoriented.

JAD: And almost immediately ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Probably within the first six feet ...

ANN HOHENHAUS: The cat's brain says, "Okay, turn your front half over. Now bring your back legs around."

ROBERT: That's like instinct.

DAVID QUAMMEN: A cat can apparently do that move lickety-split.

ROBERT: But the cat is still speeding up.

ANN HOHENHAUS: Going faster and faster.

JAD: Three floors, five floors, seven floors.

ROBERT: After falling about nine floors ...

JAD: And accelerating to speeds ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Up to about 60 miles an hour ...

JAD: ... something happens.

DAVID QUAMMEN: You hit an equilibrium between the pull of gravity and wind resistance.

JAD: What he means is gravity is pulling down on you, and the peak pull is between five and nine floors for a cat, but after nine floors, the wind resistance, which all the while has been pushing back up on you, starts to slow you down.

DAVID QUAMMEN: You don't speed up anymore.

ROBERT: So that's your cruising speed.

DAVID QUAMMEN: That's your cruising speed. After the cats hit terminal velocity and the sensation of acceleration was gone, they relax. They sort of stretch out like a flying squirrel, and then they hit the ground, belly flop ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And you're saying that because they hit this cruising speed and then relaxed into the flying squirrel the impact is less?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yes.

ANN HOHENHAUS: Yeah. And our record here—it wasn't in this paper, but our record is 42 floors and the cat walked away.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: 42 floors! Is that a lucky cat, or is that just plain physics? Should cats everywhere go to the 42nd floor before jumping out of the window?

ANN HOHENHAUS: No cat should ever jump out of a window. [laughs]

JAD: That's right, stay indoors. [cat meows] No, Fluffy! Back! Okay, so the next falling, what are we going to call these falling ...

ROBERT: Falling episodes?

JAD: No, is there an F-word we could use?

ROBERT: Features?

JAD: Yes, great. Great!

ROBERT: Our next falling feature ...

BRIAN GREENE: Oh, boy!

ROBERT: ... we invited Columbia University physics professor, Brian Greene, into our studio.

BRIAN GREENE: Do I get to play with any buttons?

JAD: Uh. yeah.

ROBERT: We wanted to ask him well, really one of the most basic questions you could ask a physicist ...

JAD: Why do we fall?

BRIAN GREENE: You know, we all know that Newton wrote down a law of gravity to calculate how gravity acts from one object to another.

JAD: You know, if you drop your pen ...

BRIAN GREENE: That's right. But there's a difference between being able to predict what will happen and be able to explain why it happens. And Newton could not explain why it happens. He could only tell you what would happen.

JAD: But I mean, how it works is it just pulls the pen down.

BRIAN GREENE: What does that mean, though? How does it pull it? I don't see anything between the table and your pen, so what is the agent responsible for the pull?

JAD: Um—hmm.

ROBERT: This is something even Albert Einstein himself couldn't quite figure out.

BRIAN GREENE: He was struggling to understand how the force of gravity works. And it was a big, big puzzle.

ROBERT: And the legend goes that Albert Einstein was walking around one day, and he found himself imagining a person riding in an elevator. And all of a sudden, the cable gets cut and the elevator starts to plunge right down towards the Earth.

JAD: The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window, and was imagining window washers falling from their scaffolding, but it's the same—same exact idea.

ROBERT: [laughs] Anyway, we're gonna stick with the elevator version for now. Einstein imagined this person standing actually on a bathroom scale ...

JAD: In the elevator.

ROBERT: In the elevator. This is before the cable gets cut.

BRIAN GREENE: If the person is in the elevator standing on a scale, they see that they weigh 160 pounds.

ROBERT: And then—snip!

BRIAN GREENE: When the elevator cable is cut, they look down at the scale and the scale will drop to zero, because the scale will be falling away from their feet at exactly the same rate that their feet are falling. So their feet won't push on the scale any longer because the scale will be moving downward with them.

JAD: In my mind, I imagine like a Hollywood movie where it's falling so fast, everybody kind of drifts up almost.

BRIAN GREENE: That's right. So Einstein said to himself, "Hang on a second, here's an environment where, in essence, I can turn gravity off."

ROBERT: Hmm.

BRIAN GREENE: Another way of saying it that flips it around and may make it more clear, just as you can turn gravity off by snapping the cable, you can actually simulate gravity by pulling on the cable that pulls that elevator up really, really quickly, because now the scale is running into your feet. If you're standing on that scale, it won't read 160, it might read 250.

JAD: Huh. It seems like gravity and being pulled up really fast, they're the same thing.

BRIAN GREENE: They are.

ROBERT: Jad, look at you! You just had the insight on your own!

BRIAN GREENE: That's right!

JAD: He walked us 17 steps, and I just made the last baby step.

BRIAN GREENE: Well, now you did it. You did it, man. So whenever you're faced with a gravitational problem, this allowed you to ignore gravity and translate it into a problem about motion.

JAD: But does that solve the 'what is gravity' question? It just sort of ...

BRIAN GREENE: No, he then had to make one more leap, and it's not obvious how he took the final step, but the final step was to realize that the 'what is gravity' is the curvature of space and time. That's a leap.

JAD: I don't know what that means.

ROBERT: Well, this is a very difficult concept ...

JAD: Do you understand it?

ROBERT: I understand what Einstein tells you when he explained it. He said, if you imagine the universe as a vast rubber mat, a rubber mat held really, really taut.

JAD: Yeah?

ROBERT: Let's just take—oh, I don't know, let's take the Earth and just plop it onto the mat. So what just happened?

JAD: Well, it sunk into the rubber.

ROBERT: It stretched the rubber, didn't it?

JAD: Yeah, I mean ...

ROBERT: So the rubber is kind of curved around underneath it.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: In Einstein's mind, he thought, "Maybe this is how to explain gravity. This is what gravity is."

BRIAN GREENE: That curved shape of space, he said.

JAD: Hmm.

BRIAN GREENE: And the pen falls because it's following a contour in that curved space-time environment.

JAD: Oh, so if we're living on the curve, then we're constantly falling. We're falling down that contour.

ROBERT: We're moving down that curve, yeah. We have no choice.

BRIAN GREENE: And the reason why right now I feel the chair pushing up on me is again, my body also wants to slide down, but the chair’s getting in the way.

JAD: So we're all sort of on some kind of slope sliding down, unless we're ...

BRIAN GREENE: Yes, that's right. That's right.

JAD: I like that.

BRIAN GREENE: Yeah.

JAD: I'm now an adherent to that theory.

BRIAN GREENE: There you go.

JAD: Not knowing anything else. Now for number five, should we call it "Falling Fortunes?" Or ...

ROBERT: Well, "Falling Fortunes" is a good one for this, I think.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Because someone is seeking fame and fortune, and then ...

JAD: Falls.

GARRETT SODEN: The idea of the gravity hero, to me, one of the things that—it goes along with ...

JAD: Was that a term that was used, gravity heroes?

GARRETT SODEN: No, that's my term.

JAD: I like it, though. It's a really catchy term.

GARRETT SODEN: Well, thanks. Yeah.

JAD: This is Garrett Soden, he's an author.

GARRETT SODEN: Author of Defying Gravity.

JAD: Original title.

GARRETT SODEN: Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill - A History.

JAD: Speaking of history and fears and thrills, and I would add to that list, tragedy, he tells the following story ...

GARRETT SODEN: It really started with Niagara Falls, because up to that point, people had done all kinds of things at Niagara Falls.

JAD: To back up, it is the 1850s, and at Niagara Falls, you've got these two guys doing tightrope tricks over the falls.

GARRETT SODEN: Yeah.

JAD: A fellow named Charles Blondin ...

GARRETT SODEN: Famous French wire-walker.

JAD: ... and a Canadian guy who called himself ...

GARRETT SODEN: The Great Farini.

JAD: And they would duke it out.

GARRETT SODEN: Right. Blondin came out, strung a rope across Niagara Falls, put a chair down balanced on two legs, and stood on it.

JAD: Whoa!

GARRETT SODEN: One time, he carried a guy over.

JAD: Oh, wow.

GARRETT SODEN: He had to keep upping the ante, so ...

JAD: So for his greatest trick ...

GARRETT SODEN: He carried a small cast iron stove on his back with some firewood. He got out there and he put the stove down, lit a fire, had a couple of eggs and a frying pan, and made an omelet.

JAD: [laughs] Right over this churning, like, rapid?

GARRETT SODEN: Yes.

JAD: Wow!

GARRETT SODEN: So The Great Farini came out with a washing machine, that was his answer to Blondin. Wash some clothes out there. Yeah.

JAD: But the thing to know about these guys is this was—this was basically just a show, because for example, the wire that they walked on was pretty wide.

GARRETT SODEN: About the diameter of a coffee cup.

JAD: And really, they were just avoiding the big trick.

GARRETT SODEN: The most anticipated trick.

JAD: The one that everybody was waiting for.

GARRETT SODEN: Was somebody going over the falls in a barrel.

JAD: The guy who did that would be the real gravity hero, you wire-walking wusses. Niagara Falls is one of the great forces of nature. Every second, 600,000 gallons fall over the edge, pound the rocks below with such a fury that you can hear it five miles away. Which is why, in 1850, when P.T. Barnum saw the Falls ...

JOAN MURRAY: He said that if someone could figure out a way to go over that, that would be a huge stunt that would give them fame and fortune.

JAD: That's Joan Murray, she's ...

JOAN MURRAY: I'm a poet.

JAD: ... she's a poet. She's written a whole book ...

JOAN MURRAY: In verse.

JAD: ... about the first person to conquer the Falls.

JOAN MURRAY: In a barrel.

JAD: And it's called ...

JOAN MURRAY: Queen of the Mist.

ROBERT: Queen of the Mist, huh. So it wasn't a guy then.

JAD: No, I just said it was a guy to set you up so that you would ask me that question, because in fact, it was a woman.

ROBERT: Wow! Props to her!

JAD: Thank you for acting surprised.

ROBERT: What's her name, Jad?

JOAN MURRAY: Annie Taylor.

JAD: When we first meet Annie Taylor ...

JOAN MURRAY: This was 1901.

JAD: ... she was ...

JOAN MURRAY: Down on her luck.

GARRETT SODEN: She'd been a—she'd done a lot of different things. She'd run a dancing school, she had been a principal, she had traveled all over the world.

JAD: Her only child had died, her husband right after that. And she was broke. But then it hit her. She was sitting at home.

GARRETT SODEN: Sitting in her apartment ...

JAD: In Bay City, Michigan.

GARRETT SODEN: And for some odd reason, she read an article about the goings-on at Niagara Falls, and she decided she would go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

JOAN MURRAY: Yeah.

JAD: Why? I mean, do we know?

JOAN MURRAY: She's looking to save herself from the poorhouse.

GARRETT SODEN: She was after money.

JAD: And when she read about these guys at Niagara Falls, she thought, "This is it."

GARRETT SODEN: Right. So she called a cooper to build the barrel. At first, he refused to build it when he heard what her plan was, but finally he did.

JAD: And not long after, Annie was on a train with her barrel headed to the Falls.

JAD: By the way, what day are we talking about? Just so we have a date.

JOAN MURRAY: On October 24 in 1901.

JAD: Okay.

GARRETT SODEN: Word had spread.

JAD: This was gonna be a spectacle.

JOAN MURRAY: Everyone was there.

GARRETT SODEN: Mobs of people.

JAD: Thousands.

GARRETT SODEN: Up and down the river.

JAD: Tens of thousands. And Annie shows up ...

JOAN MURRAY: Waving to the crowd.

JAD: ... wearing a very fancy Victorian dress.

JOAN MURRAY: And a hat with ostrich feathers.

JAD: Wow!

JOAN MURRAY: She's quite the lady, but then they go on an island where she changes ...

JAD: Into some gym clothes.

JOAN MURRAY: And now she gets in the barrel.

JAD: They tow her out to the middle of the river ...

JOAN MURRAY: And then they knock and cut the rope, and off she goes to the brink.

GARRETT SODEN: The roar of the river ...

JOAN MURRAY: "Enormous. And it's wet at my feet, and I'm feeling while I'm in there that this is miserable."

JAD: The interesting thing is that in Joan's poem, she actually becomes Annie.

JOAN MURRAY: "I careened and spun."

JAD: She's in the barrel getting hurled down the river, tossed and turned.

JOAN MURRAY: "My brain torn ..."

JAD: And as she gets closer to the edge—it's about a half-mile journey—she begins to hallucinate.

JOAN MURRAY: "I glimpse through the turbulence, there was my young husband. In his arms, our baby trembling and whimpering as ..."

JAD: And then ...

GARRETT SODEN: This moment of weightlessness.

JOAN MURRAY: She's going ...

JAD: Down, into the pools below.

GARRETT SODEN: The great mass of foam, and boiling water.

JAD: And then she shoots out again.

GARRETT SODEN: Through the buoyancy of the barrel, about 15 feet in the air.

JAD: Wow!

JAD: The barrel crashes back.

GARRETT SODEN: Back down on the water.

JAD: And then it floats over to some rocks, and a rescue team paddled out to the barrel right away.

GARRETT SODEN: They get the barrel, and they have to saw it open.

JAD: The crowd no doubt is thinking, "That woman is dead. There's nothing but a dead woman in that barrel."

JOAN MURRAY: But ...

JAD: When they pull her out ...

GARRETT SODEN: Pull her out ...

JOAN MURRAY: She's alive. "I am alive." She took on this thing that the world was waiting for and she did it. She was the first to ever try.

JAD: And Joan, when she was pulled out of that barrel, and presumably she's gonna take the next step into fame and fortune, what happened?

JOAN MURRAY: More or less nothing. She stepped out of the barrel, and she didn't look right. She didn't look like a hero.

ROBERT: What does that mean?

JAD: Well, I've kept something from you, Krulwich.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: The thing I haven't told you is that, not only was she wet and soggy, and according to newspaper accounts, hysterical—I mean, who wouldn't be? She was 63.

JOAN MURRAY: She was your grandmother.

JAD: She was an older lady. Like Joan said, you know, for the hero-consuming public, she just didn't look right.

GARRETT SODEN: After that exhibition, her manager ran off with the barrel. And he took the barrel, and he started going on the circuit with a lovely young woman that he claimed was Annie Taylor.

JAD: No!

GARRETT SODEN: Much better showpiece.

ROBERT: Ay-yi-yi. What happened to Annie, though?

JOAN MURRAY: She would drag herself to Niagara each spring and summer.

GARRETT SODEN: She would just sit on the street with a barrel. It wasn't the original barrel, but it was a barrel.

JAD: And do what?

GARRETT SODEN: She probably had photographs of herself that she signed.

JAD: And did she ever make any money off this?

JOAN MURRAY: No. No, she died in a poorhouse.

GARRETT SODEN: Which is where she didn't want to wind up, but that is where she wound up.

JAD: And just 10 years later, somebody repeats Annie's feat.

JOAN MURRAY: A man. And he tours the world.

JAD: Bastard!

JOAN MURRAY: Yeah, bastard!

JAD: But ...

JOAN MURRAY: Because the heavens are merciful ...

JAD: During this guy's victory lap, as he's traveling around the world ...

JOAN MURRAY: He slipped—he slipped on an orange rind in Australia or New Zealand, got a compound fracture of his leg.

JAD: Ha! [laughs]

JAD: She says that leg got gangrene and he died.

JOAN MURRAY: Yeah. There is—there is cosmic justice.

JAD: We'll be right back.

[ANN HOHENHAUS: This is Ann Hohenhaus reading the Radiolab credits. Support for NPR comes from NPR stations and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age.]

[DAVID QUAMMEN: The George Lucas Educational Foundation, providing schools with work strategies for 21st-century success..]

[ANN HOHENHAUS: Learn more at Edutopia.org.]

[DAVID QUAMMEN: And the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, making grants to solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. On the web at Hewlett.org. This is NPR. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.]

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