#bertillon

Photograph of Chin Wah Affixed to Bertillon Measurement Card

Record Group 129: Records of the Bureau of PrisonsSeries: Inmate Case FilesFile Unit: Chin Wah, Inmate No. 5428

Tableau des Nuances de l'Iris Humain by Alphonse Bertillon (1893).

Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and a biometrics researcher. He studied how different human traits, e.g. height, hair, handwriting etc. can be used in police work to identify potential criminals. The image above shows Bertillon’s detailed descriptions of different types of human iris, which can also be used as a biometric.  In 1888 Bertillon also standardised the use of photographic images in police work and invented what we now call a ‘mugshot’.

Bertillon System of Criminal Identification

St Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, June 6, 1909

Wikipedia says that: Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. He is also the inventor of the mug shot. Photographing of criminals began in the 1840s only a few years after the invention of photography, but it was not until 1888 that Bertillon standardized the process.

and later: 

Bertillon was by many accounts regarded as extremely eccentric. According to Maurice Paleologue, who observed him at the second court-martial, Bertillon was “certainly not in full possession of his faculties”. Paleologue goes on to describe Bertillon’s argument as “…a long tissue of absurdities,” and writes of “…his moonstruck eyes, his sepulchral voice, the saturnine magnetism” that made him feel that he was “…in the presence of a necromancer.”