For context: I was listening to a podcast about a Canadian movie called The Peanut Butter Solution. A kid gets scared and loses his hair, but friendly ghosts give him a solution. However, it works wrongly and his hair starts growing out of control, inspiring an art teacher to kidnap him and keep him to use his hair for brushes (and presumably make millions and/or take over the world).
My question is this: if I was cursed with hair that grew very quickly to a massive length, what would be the most financially successful use of this malady?
I knew a woman who did a lot of gardening. She would get swept up hair from a barber shop and place the hair in bags made of old nylons. She hung the bags of hair around the perimeter of her garden to repel animals.
No idea if it works, but she went through an awful lot of it didn’t.
Apparently human hair is better than that of most mammals for soaking up oil. There was a barber who came up with a program to collect hair clippings from other barbers, and put it in nylon bags to help with oil-spill reclamation efforts.
Also an experiment used bales of human hair to create a large filter deployed across a river. The water passing through it was visible ‘cleaner’ and after the test a number of pollutants including PCBs were found trapped in the material. IIRC how long such a filter would be effective before it became saturated with silt and pollutants was questionable. A short term deployment to clean oil spills and other discharges seems more viable.
I remember reading (a long time ago) that the Ancient Greeks collected women’s hair to make the ropes that powered catapults. No clue if that was actually true. But it would be an interesting way to use continuously-growing hair - at least once. Sort of an art or history enactment.
Well, the press releases at the time said that it actually worked better than any of the existing techniques for cleaning up oil spills… but then again, I haven’t heard anything about it since, so probably there were some practical issues in the details.
Not sure how to reply. As to why it was used, in the book, they didn’t explain beyond a general “the hair was better for catapults.”
I’m guessing that harvested hair has a longer “staple length” than other fibers and that might affect the usability of the rope. But that’s me guessing.
Politically, if your city-state is being attacked, letting women donate hair to the war effort may help promote group cohesion.
As to why I’m suggesting it as a possible use now, well, catapults are cool. They’re like trebuchets with the added danger of snapping if wound too tight.
Perhaps you meant a trebouffant? It shoots projectiles full of body and bounce.
Australian Aboriginal people made rope and cord from carefully gathered human hair. There were no other long-haired animals available, and it seems to have had properties that vegetable fibres couldn’t provide.
