Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And collections are by definition
Speaker 1: kind of weird. The collectors devote days, weeks, months, even
Speaker 1: years to compiling excessive quantities of stamps. They'll never mail coins,
Speaker 1: they'll never spend hair, They'll never wait what, yes, you
Speaker 1: heard that right? Hair? Take for example, nineteenth century lawyer
Speaker 1: and naturalist Peter A. Brown. He has the distinction of
Speaker 1: having cultivated the world's greatest known hair collection. In the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties and fifties, Brown decided he would try to
Speaker 1: piece together a scientific portrait of humanity by obtaining as
Speaker 1: many hair specimens as possible. He wanted strands from famous figures,
Speaker 1: in regular folks, living in dead. Basically, if a person
Speaker 1: had hair, Brown wanted it. He collected samples from a fetus,
Speaker 1: a one year old man, patients in the Western Virginia
Speaker 1: Lunatic Asylum, celebrities can joined twins, a corpse that have
Speaker 1: been buried for third two years, and a convicted murderer.
Speaker 1: Before and after his hanging. Of course, Brown even had
Speaker 1: a few strands of George Washington's hair, courtesy of the
Speaker 1: late president's Barber's son. He had samples from thirteen of
Speaker 1: the first fourteen US presidents, so all in all, a
Speaker 1: pretty weirdly thorough collection. What exactly was the point of
Speaker 1: all this hair gathering, you might ask? According to the
Speaker 1: book Specimens of Hair, the Curious Collection of Peter A.
Speaker 1: Brown by Robert McCracken, Peck Brown was on a mission
Speaker 1: to explain the differences and similarities between humans. Years before
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin blew the world's collective mind with his theory
Speaker 1: of evolution, Brown obsessively sought to understand how and why
Speaker 1: there was so much variance in human beings appearances. Peck
Speaker 1: told the arts and culture website hyper Allergic, his fellow
Speaker 1: members of the Academy of Natural Sciences were doing the
Speaker 1: same things with birds and insects and fish, and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what were the distinctive characteristics that separated
Speaker 1: one from another and combined one with another. With humans,
Speaker 1: that a much more fraught political and social issue. Any
Speaker 1: attempt he made to separate people into separate species, as
Speaker 1: he called them at the time, was doomed to failure,
Speaker 1: and rightly so, because we recognize that all humans are
Speaker 1: from the same origin. But Brown didn't know that, so
Speaker 1: he collected. And perhaps the strangest part about his strange
Speaker 1: collection is that for the era, it wasn't considered strange
Speaker 1: at all, Peck said in an interview with the Academy
Speaker 1: of Natural Sciences of Drextile University, or the a n
Speaker 1: SP for short. The collection may seem weird by today's standards,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was made, it was considered
Speaker 1: very important by scientists around the world. Brown referred to
Speaker 1: it as a national collection. It contained not just the
Speaker 1: hair of humans, but the wool of sheep and the
Speaker 1: fur and hair of many other animals. It was a
Speaker 1: collection made for scientific purposes and for the love of country.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the world a Victorian hair culture. If you
Speaker 1: haven't heard of this, consider a recent news story out
Speaker 1: of the UK wherein a woman stumbled upon a ring
Speaker 1: containing a lot of Charlotte Bronte's hair while waiting through
Speaker 1: her late father in law's attic. She opened a curious
Speaker 1: metal box and found a single ring inside inscribed Bronte's
Speaker 1: name and the date of her death. So the woman
Speaker 1: did what anyone in sudden, unexpected possession of an old
Speaker 1: trinket might do. She went on Antiques Road Show. On
Speaker 1: the show, she told jewelry expert Jeffrey Munn she suspected
Speaker 1: she might have accidentally inherited some of Bronte's strands. Munn
Speaker 1: wasn't phazed, he explained on the show, it was a
Speaker 1: convention to make jewelry out of hair. In the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: There was a terror of not being able to remember
Speaker 1: the face and the character of the person who had died. Yes.
Speaker 1: In those days, people often wove bits of hair into
Speaker 1: just about everything, from rings and bracelets and cuff links
Speaker 1: to intricate framed art pieces suitable for display. Peck told
Speaker 1: the NSP blog the hair Family and Friends was commonly
Speaker 1: exchanged and retained through the nineteenth century. It was often framed,
Speaker 1: kept an albums, or featured in jewelry. Today, many parents
Speaker 1: still retained the hair from their child's first haircut, but
Speaker 1: it's rarely put on public display as it was during
Speaker 1: the Victorian era. That kind of thing is also probably
Speaker 1: not as valuable as Brontes. Mun told the Lady with
Speaker 1: the Ring that while her newly discovered jewelry was probably
Speaker 1: only worth about thirty two bucks, the famous authors strands
Speaker 1: bumped up the value to about twenty six thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: But back to Peter A. Brown. While he never realized
Speaker 1: his albeit flawed and problematic dream of separating the human
Speaker 1: race in two species, he did make an enduring contribution
Speaker 1: to modern science. Peck said to hyper Allergic, what is
Speaker 1: so useful about this collection now is that all of
Speaker 1: that DNA is preserved. And he had no idea he
Speaker 1: was doing that. When he sent out his requests to
Speaker 1: people for hair, he actually asked them to send the
Speaker 1: roots of the hair the follicles. Many of them did
Speaker 1: just clip it, but with the follicles attached, that is
Speaker 1: a gold mine. And Peck actually helped save this collection
Speaker 1: from total destruction, he told the n s P blog.
Speaker 1: In the mid seventies, before anyone recognized the importance and
Speaker 1: irreplaceable value of the DNA contained in Brown's collection, a
Speaker 1: staff member, in a position to determine its fate, decided
Speaker 1: that the wool, fur and human here it contained was
Speaker 1: of no current scientific interest and was taking up too
Speaker 1: much space, and he decided to discard it. I was
Speaker 1: lucky to be in the right place at the right
Speaker 1: time to spot it and save it from oblivion. Who
Speaker 1: would have guessed it would one day become a collection
Speaker 1: of such interest and the subject of a book. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Michelle Konstantinovski and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other Harry topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
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