Collections are by definition kind of uncanny . Collectors dedicate days , week , months , even years to compiling inordinate quantities ofstampsthey’ll never mail , coins they ’ll never spend , hair’s-breadth they ’ll never — wait , what ? Yes , you read that rightfulness : hair’s-breadth . Nineteenth - C lawyer and naturalist Peter A. Browne has the distinction of having cultivated the human race ’s greatest hair appeal . Sort of makes your prized record assemblage seem tiresome , does n’t it ?
In the 1840s and ' 50s , Browne adjudicate he would try topiece togethera scientific portrayal of humanity by hold as many haircloth specimens as possible . He need strand from notable flesh , regular sept , life , dead — basically , if a person had haircloth , Browne want it . He collected samples from a fetus , a 100 - class - old human race , patients in the Western Virginia Lunatic Asylum , celebrity , conjoined twins , a cadaver that had been bury for 32 year , and a convicted liquidator ( before and after his suspension , of course ) . Browne even had a few strands of George Washington ’s hair , good manners of the former president ’s Samuel Barber ’s son . He actually had samples from 13 of the first 14 U.S. presidents . So , all in all , a pretty terrifyingly exhaustive collection .
What exactly was the point of all this hair assemblage , you might ask ? According to the book"Specimens of Hair : The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne"by Robert McCracken Peck , Browne was on a mission to explicate the deviation and similarities between humans . age before Charles Darwin blew the world ’s collective mind with his possibility of organic evolution , Browne obsessively endeavor to understand how and why there was so much variance in human beings .
" His fellow members of the Academy of Natural Sciences were doing the same thing with bird and insect and Pisces the Fishes , and trying to figure out what were the distinctive characteristics that divide one from another , and mix one with another,“Peck toldthe humanistic discipline and culture site Hyperallergic . " With humans , that became a much more fraught political and social issue . Any endeavour he made to separate citizenry into disjoined species , as he send for them at the meter , was doomed to unsuccessful person , and justifiedly so , because we recognize that all humans are from the same source . "
But Browne did n’t sleep together that . So , he collected . And perhaps the weirdest part about his uncanny collection is that for the era , it was n’t considered weird at all . " The collection may seem ' eldritch ' by today ’s standards , but at the time it was made it was considered very important by scientists around the world,“Peck saidin an audience with The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University ( ANSP ) , where is he is a senior fellow . " Browne referred to it as a national collection . It contained not just the hair of humanity , but the wool of sheep and the fur and hair’s-breadth of many other mammals . It was a assemblage made for scientific aim and for the love of country . "
And if you do n’t believe that Browne ’s hair garner compulsion was n’t all that odd for the era , regard this news tale out of the U.K. , where a woman stumbled upon a ring take Charlotte Brontë ’s locks . While wading through her recent don - in - law ’s attic , the nameless cleaning woman from Erddig , Wales unlock a curious metallic element boxwood and found a single halo inside encrypt with Brontë ’s name and the date of her decease . So the woman did what anyone in sudden unexpected monomania of an old trinket might do : She belong on " Antiques Roadshow . " On the show , she told jewelry expert Geoffrey Munn she suspect she might have accidentally inherited some of Brontë ’s strands . Munn was n’t fazed . " It was a convention to make jewelry out of hair’s-breadth in the 19th century , " he said . " There was a panic of not being able to think back the font and character of the mortal who had died . "
Apparently , before selfies and Snapchats pretty much bankrupt our life , people often wind bit of hair into just about everything from rings and bracelets to cufflink and more . " The hair’s-breadth of fellowship and friends was unremarkably exchanged and keep on throughout the nineteenth hundred , " Peck told theANSP blog . " It was often redact , kept in albums , or featured in jewelry . Today many parent still retain the hair from their child ’s first haircut , but it is rarely put on public display as it was during the prim era . " It ’s also probably not as valuable as Brontë ’s ; Munn told the lady with the ring that while her newly give away jewelry was probably only worth about $ 32 , the famous author ’s chain bump up the economic value to about $ 26,000 .
But back to Browne . While he never realized his ( blemished and elusive ) ambition of separating the human slipstream into ' species , ' he did make an enduring contribution to mod science . " What is so utilitarian about this accumulation now is all of that DNA is preserved , and he had no idea he was doing that when he sent out his requests to multitude for hair,“Peck say in Hyperallergic . " He actually asked them to transmit the ascendent of the whisker , the follicle — many of them did just clip it — but with the follicles tie , that is a goldmine . "
And Peck is n’t just the expert responsible for immortalizing Browne ’s legacy in words — he ’s also the guy wire who aid save it from entire destruction . " In the mid-1970s , before anyone recognized the grandness and unreplaceable note value of the deoxyribonucleic acid contained in Browne ’s compendium , a staff penis in a position to fix its fate decided that the woolen , pelt and human pilus it comprise was of no ( current ) scientific interest and was taking up too much space and he decided to discard it , " Peck told theANSP web log . " I was lucky to be in the right place at the right clock time to descry it and save it from oblivion . Who would have guessed it would one day become a collection of such interestingness and the theme of a al-Qur’an ? ! "
