In a 1975 monograph called Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed, Bernard Vonnegut considers what might happen to a dead chicken if it were fired from a cannon. He explains: “One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to determine by experiment what air speed is required to blow all the feathers off a chicken, a phenomenon known to occur in severe storms.”
The conventional wisdom about this technique can be found in HA Hazen’s book The Tornado, published in 1890.
Vonnegut concludes that because “the force required to remove the feathers from the follicles varies over a wide range in a complicated and unpredictable way, the plucking phenomenon is of doubtful value as an index”.
For decisively overturning one of science’s oldest unchallenged assumptions, Vonnegut won the 1997 Ig Nobel prize in the field of meteorology.