Everybody talks about Newton and the apple, which is an apocryphal story at best. I'm here to talk about something we have hard, scientific facts about -- Newton's luscious locks. Yes, that's undoubtedly a wig in the image everybody associates with him. Louis XIV made them hip (dude had 48 wigmakers), so they were a pretty popular way to show your class in the late 17th century. Newton's looks pretty good so we're gonna guess he went with human hair, as opposed to the yak alternative. And being a scientist, he was probably clever enough to know not to purchase a plague-victim-harvested head of hair. (Who looked at the dead bodies and thought, "All that hair going to waste!" Whomever it was, we're sure they were fa-bu-lous.) But the interesting part is Newton's own hair, the stuff under the wig. Testing in 1979 showed strands of hair purported to be Newton's to have elevated levels of mercury, lead, arsenic, and antimony. So apparently you get bouncy curls by shampooing with heavy metals. More recent mitochondrial DNA testing has shown that the hair might or might not have been Newton's. We don't know what to make of that, but we think he'd be elated that he's still a subject of science debate almost 300 years after his death.
No comments:
Post a Comment