Curiosity Killed the Cat, Or Did It?

Plenary Speech for Research Night – April 27, 2026

Research Night is FPU students’ night to show off the learning you have been doing throughout the semester and quite honestly, throughout your college experience. This is the culmination of your hours of dedication to study and diligence in learning for many of you. So, in many ways this is another celebration of academic success in a series of celebrations, which will include Commencement in just under two weeks.

Research night is also a celebration in curiosity. It is an opportunity to celebrate the questions students wondered and the journey to satisfaction of those questions. As I was preparing for this opportunity to address such a brilliant and high achieving group, I was struck by the theme of curiosity. So, I began thinking about ways in which curiosity has been viewed particularly in western culture.

The phrase that immediately came to mind was not an encouraging one. You likely know it. Anyone want to take a guess as to what phrase about curiosity I first thought of?

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

As I sat with that phrase determining that it was completely inappropriate for a night like tonight, I became, well…Curious about it. So, I began to research its origin and meaning. Here is what I learned….

First, there is a whole community of people who are dedicated to finding the origins of these kinds of phrases. That in and of itself fascinates me. They spend hours digging through documents, books and other kinds of materials to hunt down when a phrase like “Curiosity killed the cat” first was used. And often what these individuals discover is that a phrase doesn’t always just pop out somewhere. Rather it develops over time. Such is the case with “Curiosity killed the cat.”

According to Gary Martin, a researcher of the origins of phrases and the creator of the Phrase Finder website, the original phrase was likely from Ben Johnson’s play Every Man in His Humor which was written in 1598. The original wording of the phrase is what is really interesting. It originally said that “Care’ll kill a cat.” Care here means worry or sorrow and the idea was that too much worrying was a bad thing. So, curiosity wasn’t even part of the origins of the saying “Curiosity Killed the Cat.” Curiosity became the feline murderer in around 1898, when the Galveston Daily News used the phrase “curiosity killed a Thomas cat” or a tom cat.

What I learned from this brief investigation into the phrase was that curiosity has always had something of a mixed reception. There are some who are deeply threatened by the curious. But curiosity is also innately within us and some embrace that natural tendency to investigate, taking the risk of poking into unknown things to discover something wonderful, and maybe even terrible, but always furthering our understanding of the world. And maybe that is why, according to Gary Martin, the Titusville Herald in 1912 added to the phrase to make it less scary stating: “You will find greater values here. We are told: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”

I think this is true because curiosity has an important sibling partner called imagination. In my childhood, my parents would often send me out to the alley to throw away the garbage, only to wonder an hour or so later what happened to me as I hadn’t returned. In fact, I had discovered some piece of discarded “trash” that had triggered my curiosity and sparked my imagination and became a sword, or a dragon, or a phaser, etc. I could spend an hour or more discovering and imagining whole new worlds and stories. Curiosity truly has a sibling in imagination.

As I wrap up my comments, I think of Mars. The fourth planet has held human imagination for millennia, but in more recent times writers like C.S. Lewis and Isaac Asimov have provoked imagination about this planet in the last 100 years. TV shows and movies like My Favorite Martian, The Martian, and Ad Astra have added to our intrigue. NASA has been working toward making our science fiction a reality, including with the most recent successful Artemis II mission. But one of the most notable achievements related to investigating Mars is the Mars rover program. Here’s a little information I learned from my good friend W. K. Pedia (Wikipedia).

As of May 2021, there have been six successful Mars rovers; five are managed by the American NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a sixth is managed by the China National Space Administration.

• Sojourner (1997)
• Spirit (2004–2010)
• Opportunity (2004–2018)
• Perseverance (2021–present)
• Zhurong (2021–2022)

Who did I skip? The one convenient to my purposes named Curiosity. Launched in 2011 and landing in 2012, Curiosity is currently exploring Mars more than a decade after its original two-year mission.

But I want to focus on how Curiosity got its name. “A NASA panel selected the name Curiosity following a nationwide student contest that attracted more than 9,000 proposals via the internet and mail. Twelve-year-old Clara Ma from Sunflower Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas submitted the winning entry. As her prize, Ma won a trip to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where she signed her name directly onto the rover as it was being assembled.

“Ma wrote in her winning essay:

Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder.”

Curiosity might kill the cat, but satisfaction of that curiosity and a healthy dose of imagination and wonder does most certainly bring it back. Keep wondering, keep imagining, keep being curious!

Editor's note: This transcript references historical research by Gary Martin of Phrase Finder on the origins of the phrase "Curiosity killed the cat" and includes publicly available information from NASA regarding the Curiosity Mars rover and Clara Ma's winning naming essay.