Was Schrödinger's cat really meant to be alive and dead at once?

No. Schrödinger's cat was never meant as a real claim that a cat could be alive and dead at once. Erwin Schrödinger invented it in 1935 to mock a view of quantum mechanics held by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. His point: scale that view up to something everyday, and it sounds absurd.

In his own words, the setup was 'completely burlesque'. A cat sits sealed in a steel chamber with a tiny amount of radioactive substance. In an hour, there's an even chance that one atom decays, or that none does. If one decays, a Geiger counter releases a hammer that shatters a flask of poison, killing the cat. Now suppose an atom really sits in a superposition of two states until it is measured. Then the whole box, cat included, should be a superposition of alive and dead until it's opened. Schrödinger found that ridiculous, and took it as a sign the picture was incomplete.

The joke took on a life of its own. Instead of settling the debate, it became its most famous picture. Physicists still argue about when and how a superposition turns into one definite outcome. This puzzle is called the measurement problem, and different interpretations answer it differently. One popular myth says a conscious mind is what decides; no research supports that.

Superposition itself is not in doubt. Experiments at the atomic scale have shown very small objects in superposition. Doing it with something as large as a cat would face enormous technical difficulties. Nobody has superposed a cat, and the thought experiment was never meant to be performed.