IP: some early biometrics history

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: "Paulius Micikevicius" <pmicikev () cs ucf edu>
> To: <farber () dsl cis upenn edu>
>
>
> Professor Farber,
>
> the subscribers of your Interesting People list may find the following 
> snippet of "early biometrics" history interesting in the light of recent 
> discussions on biometrics, sparked by a copy of Dorothy Denning's article.
>
> In the early days of criminology the detectives were faced with a problem 
> of identifying criminals who already had an arrest history.  Until late 
> 1800s identification largely relied upon "photographic memory."  This was 
> changed in 1883 when Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Paris police 
> prefecture, introduced physical-measurement system (which came to bear his 
> name: bertillonage).  Bertillon based his system on the claim that 
> measurement of adult bones does not change throughout life.  Measurements 
> in his system included: height, length, and breadth of the head, the 
> length of different fingers, the length of forearms, etc (Bertillon 
> estimated that the odds of duplicate records were 286,435,456 to 1 if 14 
> traits were used).  He also introduced a cataloguing system, which enabled 
> filing/checking records quite quickly.  The system was a success and was 
> used world-wide until 1903, when two identical (within the tolerances) 
> measurements were obtained for two different persons at the Fort 
> Leavenworth prison.  The prison switched to finger printing the following 
> day and the rest of the world followed abandoning bertillonage.
>     Today some airports are experimenting with face-scanning to identify 
> suspected terrorists.  I wonder if the accuracy of these techniques is 
> high enough to avoid frequent misidentifications (caused by either poor 
> experiment conditions or look-alikes).
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Paulius Micikevicius (<mailto:pmicikev () cs ucf edu>pmicikev () cs ucf edu)
> School of Computer Science
> University of Central Florida
>
> P.S.  The interested readers can find more details on bertillonage and the 
> incident at Fort Leavenworth in the book by Jurgen Thorwald titled "The 
> Century of the Detective."  It is long out of print but I was able to 
> easily obtain a copy from Barnes & Noble online (I'm certain many 
> libraries will have a copy too).

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