WEBVTT - Why Did Victorians Collect Hair? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:06.560 Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey, 0:00:06.600 --> 0:00:10.440 brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And collections are by definition 0:00:10.560 --> 0:00:14.040 kind of weird. The collectors devote days, weeks, months, even 0:00:14.120 --> 0:00:18.400 years to compiling excessive quantities of stamps. They'll never mail coins, 0:00:18.400 --> 0:00:22.840 they'll never spend hair, They'll never wait what, yes, you 0:00:22.960 --> 0:00:27.240 heard that right? Hair? Take for example, nineteenth century lawyer 0:00:27.280 --> 0:00:30.720 and naturalist Peter A. Brown. He has the distinction of 0:00:30.760 --> 0:00:35.120 having cultivated the world's greatest known hair collection. In the 0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:37.680 eighteen forties and fifties, Brown decided he would try to 0:00:37.760 --> 0:00:41.199 piece together a scientific portrait of humanity by obtaining as 0:00:41.240 --> 0:00:45.200 many hair specimens as possible. He wanted strands from famous figures, 0:00:45.200 --> 0:00:48.760 in regular folks, living in dead. Basically, if a person 0:00:48.840 --> 0:00:52.840 had hair, Brown wanted it. He collected samples from a fetus, 0:00:52.880 --> 0:00:55.880 a one year old man, patients in the Western Virginia 0:00:55.960 --> 0:00:59.120 Lunatic Asylum, celebrities can joined twins, a corpse that have 0:00:59.200 --> 0:01:02.120 been buried for third two years, and a convicted murderer. 0:01:02.200 --> 0:01:05.920 Before and after his hanging. Of course, Brown even had 0:01:05.959 --> 0:01:08.480 a few strands of George Washington's hair, courtesy of the 0:01:08.560 --> 0:01:12.480 late president's Barber's son. He had samples from thirteen of 0:01:12.480 --> 0:01:16.120 the first fourteen US presidents, so all in all, a 0:01:16.160 --> 0:01:20.760 pretty weirdly thorough collection. What exactly was the point of 0:01:20.800 --> 0:01:23.440 all this hair gathering, you might ask? According to the 0:01:23.520 --> 0:01:26.320 book Specimens of Hair, the Curious Collection of Peter A. 0:01:26.440 --> 0:01:29.679 Brown by Robert McCracken, Peck Brown was on a mission 0:01:29.720 --> 0:01:33.920 to explain the differences and similarities between humans. Years before 0:01:34.000 --> 0:01:36.679 Charles Darwin blew the world's collective mind with his theory 0:01:36.720 --> 0:01:40.640 of evolution, Brown obsessively sought to understand how and why 0:01:40.680 --> 0:01:44.199 there was so much variance in human beings appearances. Peck 0:01:44.280 --> 0:01:47.280 told the arts and culture website hyper Allergic, his fellow 0:01:47.280 --> 0:01:49.640 members of the Academy of Natural Sciences were doing the 0:01:49.680 --> 0:01:52.280 same things with birds and insects and fish, and trying 0:01:52.320 --> 0:01:55.320 to figure out what were the distinctive characteristics that separated 0:01:55.320 --> 0:01:59.560 one from another and combined one with another. With humans, 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:03.080 that a much more fraught political and social issue. Any 0:02:03.120 --> 0:02:06.000 attempt he made to separate people into separate species, as 0:02:06.040 --> 0:02:08.240 he called them at the time, was doomed to failure, 0:02:08.400 --> 0:02:11.040 and rightly so, because we recognize that all humans are 0:02:11.040 --> 0:02:15.519 from the same origin. But Brown didn't know that, so 0:02:15.720 --> 0:02:19.200 he collected. And perhaps the strangest part about his strange 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:22.120 collection is that for the era, it wasn't considered strange 0:02:22.120 --> 0:02:24.919 at all, Peck said in an interview with the Academy 0:02:24.960 --> 0:02:27.760 of Natural Sciences of Drextile University, or the a n 0:02:27.840 --> 0:02:31.560 SP for short. The collection may seem weird by today's standards, 0:02:31.720 --> 0:02:33.440 but at the time it was made, it was considered 0:02:33.520 --> 0:02:36.600 very important by scientists around the world. Brown referred to 0:02:36.600 --> 0:02:39.520 it as a national collection. It contained not just the 0:02:39.560 --> 0:02:41.640 hair of humans, but the wool of sheep and the 0:02:41.639 --> 0:02:43.959 fur and hair of many other animals. It was a 0:02:43.960 --> 0:02:47.600 collection made for scientific purposes and for the love of country. 0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:51.640 Welcome to the world a Victorian hair culture. If you 0:02:51.680 --> 0:02:54.119 haven't heard of this, consider a recent news story out 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.720 of the UK wherein a woman stumbled upon a ring 0:02:56.760 --> 0:02:59.960 containing a lot of Charlotte Bronte's hair while waiting through 0:03:00.160 --> 0:03:02.680 her late father in law's attic. She opened a curious 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:06.320 metal box and found a single ring inside inscribed Bronte's 0:03:06.400 --> 0:03:08.840 name and the date of her death. So the woman 0:03:08.880 --> 0:03:11.440 did what anyone in sudden, unexpected possession of an old 0:03:11.480 --> 0:03:14.760 trinket might do. She went on Antiques Road Show. On 0:03:14.760 --> 0:03:17.600 the show, she told jewelry expert Jeffrey Munn she suspected 0:03:17.639 --> 0:03:20.880 she might have accidentally inherited some of Bronte's strands. Munn 0:03:21.080 --> 0:03:23.880 wasn't phazed, he explained on the show, it was a 0:03:23.919 --> 0:03:26.560 convention to make jewelry out of hair. In the nineteenth century. 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:28.760 There was a terror of not being able to remember 0:03:28.800 --> 0:03:33.000 the face and the character of the person who had died. Yes. 0:03:33.160 --> 0:03:35.720 In those days, people often wove bits of hair into 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:38.760 just about everything, from rings and bracelets and cuff links 0:03:38.760 --> 0:03:42.920 to intricate framed art pieces suitable for display. Peck told 0:03:42.920 --> 0:03:46.240 the NSP blog the hair Family and Friends was commonly 0:03:46.280 --> 0:03:49.640 exchanged and retained through the nineteenth century. It was often framed, 0:03:49.720 --> 0:03:53.040 kept an albums, or featured in jewelry. Today, many parents 0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:55.920 still retained the hair from their child's first haircut, but 0:03:56.000 --> 0:03:58.320 it's rarely put on public display as it was during 0:03:58.320 --> 0:04:02.320 the Victorian era. That kind of thing is also probably 0:04:02.360 --> 0:04:05.040 not as valuable as Brontes. Mun told the Lady with 0:04:05.080 --> 0:04:07.600 the Ring that while her newly discovered jewelry was probably 0:04:07.640 --> 0:04:10.480 only worth about thirty two bucks, the famous authors strands 0:04:10.520 --> 0:04:13.360 bumped up the value to about twenty six thousand dollars. 0:04:14.480 --> 0:04:18.039 But back to Peter A. Brown. While he never realized 0:04:18.080 --> 0:04:21.039 his albeit flawed and problematic dream of separating the human 0:04:21.120 --> 0:04:24.560 race in two species, he did make an enduring contribution 0:04:24.600 --> 0:04:28.120 to modern science. Peck said to hyper Allergic, what is 0:04:28.160 --> 0:04:30.640 so useful about this collection now is that all of 0:04:30.680 --> 0:04:33.160 that DNA is preserved. And he had no idea he 0:04:33.200 --> 0:04:34.960 was doing that. When he sent out his requests to 0:04:35.000 --> 0:04:37.560 people for hair, he actually asked them to send the 0:04:37.640 --> 0:04:40.240 roots of the hair the follicles. Many of them did 0:04:40.279 --> 0:04:43.159 just clip it, but with the follicles attached, that is 0:04:43.160 --> 0:04:47.000 a gold mine. And Peck actually helped save this collection 0:04:47.000 --> 0:04:49.719 from total destruction, he told the n s P blog. 0:04:50.120 --> 0:04:52.880 In the mid seventies, before anyone recognized the importance and 0:04:52.880 --> 0:04:56.120 irreplaceable value of the DNA contained in Brown's collection, a 0:04:56.160 --> 0:04:58.640 staff member, in a position to determine its fate, decided 0:04:58.640 --> 0:05:00.720 that the wool, fur and human here it contained was 0:05:00.760 --> 0:05:03.400 of no current scientific interest and was taking up too 0:05:03.480 --> 0:05:06.120 much space, and he decided to discard it. I was 0:05:06.200 --> 0:05:07.760 lucky to be in the right place at the right 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:10.240 time to spot it and save it from oblivion. Who 0:05:10.240 --> 0:05:12.320 would have guessed it would one day become a collection 0:05:12.360 --> 0:05:19.720 of such interest and the subject of a book. Today's 0:05:19.720 --> 0:05:22.839 episode was written by Michelle Konstantinovski and produced by Tyler Clang. 0:05:23.200 --> 0:05:25.640 Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. 0:05:25.880 --> 0:05:27.800 For more on this and lots of other Harry topics, 0:05:27.880 --> 0:05:30.400 visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And 0:05:30.520 --> 0:05:32.799 for more podcasts in my heart radio, visit the iHeart 0:05:32.839 --> 0:05:35.440 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:05:35.440 --> 0:05:36.120 favorite shows.