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## The Hiller Lock: A Famous Name, a False Attribution
Among these carefully documented samples, the Hiller Lock stood apart—not because its history was more certain but because it was more storied, and because earlier science had made it more consequential.
The lock’s documented history begins in 1883, when Paul Hiller—son of the composer and conductor Ferdinand Hiller—wrote about a lock of hair his father had given him as a birthday gift. Ferdinand Hiller had known Beethoven in his youth; he had been in Vienna in the period immediately before and around Beethoven’s death in 1827, and it was plausible that he had been present or had connections to people who were present at the deathbed. Paul Hiller’s account named Ferdinand as the source of the lock. Ferdinand himself, however, left no documented record of how he acquired it or when.
Paul kept the lock until his death in 1911. Its whereabouts for the following several decades are not fully known. Then, in 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, a Danish doctor purchased the lock from a Jewish family that was fleeing the country, and so the lock—still labeled with its Hiller provenance—survived the war through this transaction.
In 1994, the American Beethoven Society acquired the lock, by then known as the Hiller Lock (or sometimes the Guevara Lock, after a subsequent owner). The acquisition was significant and was accompanied by some public attention, including coverage that noted the lock’s extraordinary lead content when it was tested. A 2000 analysis found lead concentrations in the hair at levels far above normal, prompting researchers to propose that Beethoven had suffered serious lead poisoning—possibly from the wine he drank, which was sometimes adulterated with lead acetate as a sweetener, or from the medical treatments he received.