They were foreshadowed by a strange experiment in 1849, carried out by a German medical professor, Arnold Adolph Berthold. He had been studying castrated cockerels, commonly known as capons. It was known that by removing their testes, these birds were left with deliciously tender meat, which made them a popular delicacy at the time. Aside from their meat, live capons looked different from normal cocks. They were more docile. They could also be spotted by a characteristic red comb on top of their heads and unusually droopy red wattles.
