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