The Beatles in 1966, when they sang about combing their hair. Photograph: Collection/Rex Features

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.

The Beatles never fully explained why they did what they did. Waggoner and Scott, in contrast, took pains to explain themselves. The Waggoner/Scott writing style differs from that of the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Savour their words:

“In an attempt to investigate characteristics of hair sound and feel as experienced by an individual during the combing process, an electronic comb which measures frequencies generated by tooth-hair interface friction was developed.”

Waggoner and Scott devised a simple method to investigate those characteristics. They wrote about it with typical panache:

“An Ace Waveserra hard rubber comb was affixed to the contact microphone by two small bolts. A third bolt, which had been placed through the comb frame, served as a pressure-adjustable contact bridge between the comb and microphone. In this situation, any sound frequencies received by the comb are carried to the contact microphone via the steel bolt.”

Waggoner and Scott’s biggest discovery, in their view, was that “bleached hair gives much higher raspiness levels than unbleached hair”.

But, like all good scientists, they express healthy scepticism about their own work. “The hair-on-hair versus comb-on-hair noise ratio should be explored,” they urge. “Our assumption that the major noise component is a result of tooth-hair interface friction may be vulnerable.”

Appearing in the Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists, under the title Instrumental Method for the Determination of Hair Raspiness, the Wagonner/Scott study indeed proved to be just one step along the path to full understanding of hair sounds.

Seven years later, a report in that same journal both paid tribute to Waggoner and Scott’s hair acoustical work, and surpassed it. Walter Newman, at Johnson & Johnson Research Center, and George Cohen and Cletus Hayes of Bristol-Myers Products, achieved one of hair science’s holy grails. Their study describes “a quantitative and reproducible method of measuring the force required to pull a comb through a tress of hair”.

This in turn led, if only metaphorically, to the publication in 2002 of one of the sublime achievements of modern physics, a study performed by seven Australian scientists under the indisputably lyrical title An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep Over Various Surfaces. The authors were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel prize in physics. Despite the strong objections of the vice-chancellor of the university at which five of them were based, the team accepted the prize, and received much subsequent international acclaim.

By Marc Abraham from the Guardian

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize.