In 1966, hair combing made noise on both sides of the Atlantic – musical noise to the east, scientific to the west.
In England, the Beatles released a song that said: “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”. In America, William C Waggoner and George V Scott of the Colgate-Palmolive Company published a monograph explaining how they had measured, with a fair degree of precision, the sound of a comb being dragged through a hank of hair….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.