Sue Bailey

teh wurldz oldist lolcatz ROFL FTW

Previously, the oldest known LOLcat was said to be from 1905; copyright info on this postcard dates it to 1902, though it wasn’t mailed until 1907.

Of course, if I were going to be Picky McPicky writing from Pedants’ Corner, I’d say that technically this isn’t a LOLcat: the caption is about the cat, rather than recording the cat’s speech. Harry Whittier Frees, who may be the father of LOLcats, published his turn-of-the-century postcards with direct speech from the cats in the pictures.

Wikipedia says that:

Images portraying cats in human-like situations with captions date as far back as the 1860s, when a Brighton photographer named Henry Pointer began publishing a carte-de-visite series.

Sadly I don’t seem to be able to find any examples of Pointer’s work online, so I don’t know if his cats talked or not.

Neferdeless, ai haz a LOLcat oldur dan mai granfaver, an iz cyut kitteh tu. Dat givs me teh happeh.