The Birth of Kitty Litter

You probably never thought about kitty litter as a world-changing invention, but it made #73 on a list of The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History. Before 1954, some people would use a sandbox for their cat to do their business in during cold weather. But then Ed Lowe introduced kitty litter, and it changed everything. Everything?

The introduction of Kitty Litter meant that after millennia of scratching at the door cats could come indoors and stay there. They had long been visitors in American homes; now they were residents. In some ways it has been a hostile takeover: There are millions more cats than dogs in the U.S. This also means that Lowe is the indirect father of countless Internet cat memes. Anyone who sells recreational laser pointers, fuzzy mice, scratching posts, cat furniture, or electric-fountain cat water dishes should thank him, too.

A simple idea that began the pet cat revolution. Read how it happened at BloombergBusinessweek. -via Digg

Love cute animals? View more at Lifestyles of the Cute and Cuddly blog

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An older lady told me she that when she was a child, she would have to wait for her father to get home with the newspaper he'd read during the day so she could rip it up and use it for her cat's box.
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I don't buy it. I know a couple people who still just use dirt in their litter boxes, with cats that never go outside. And for the record, their homes don't stink at all.

I imagine the effects tenuously attributed to clay litter were instead caused by increasing urbanization, disposable income, leisure time, etc.
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