In the middle of the nineteenth century, lawyer and naturalist Peter A. Browne of Philadelphia obsessively collected, measured, and classified the hair of humans and animals. He built what he claimed to be the largest collection of hair specimens in the world. Browne had at least two major goals in this project. First, he wanted to understand sheep’s wool in order to improve the breeding of sheep in the United States. Second, Browne thought his studies of human hair would shed light on questions surrounding the origins of human beings. Browne argued that his measurements of the hair of different races—whites, blacks, and American Indians—proved that these races actually constituted separate species because of the characteristic differences between their hair. I will examine Browne’s various methods for measuring hair. He built instruments to measure the fineness, flexibility, and tenacity of his hair samples. By quantifying certain characteristics of his specimens of sheep’s wool, Browne attempted to show that the wool of American sheep was of the same or better quality than the leading European wools. Browne’s quantification of human hair contributed to his classification of the hair of black people as an exotic object that was quite different from, and inferior to, the hair of white people. Browne’s hair studies thus present a particularly interesting example of the quantifying and measuring spirit in nineteenth-century science.
