What innovation?! Biometric identification is ancient (but not obsolete)!

Surprisingly, the developments in biometric identification are going more and more back to the fundamentals of recognizing people and recording their properties in a database. By the end of the 19th century the rise of photo’s as a means to capture one’s unique properties improved identification procedures, this was not considered as sufficient. More metrics were needed to accurately identify people (and record this) in a world of growing population and internationalization. However, thousands of years ago biometrics already had been used.

Recently I read about how in the early 1900’s prisoners, when they were imprisoned, were identified through the “Method-Bertillon”. The French police officer Alphonse Bertillon developed an identification system based on the physical measures of a person, also called “anthropometry” or “Bertillonage”. He measured the head and body, individual markings (e.g. tattoos, piercings) and personality characteristics and put these parameters into a formula. The outcome of the formula is unique for every individual. However, there appeared to be some discrepancies between separate measurement sessions. Although it was adapted by for instance the French and English police in those days, these discrepancies (also due to aging of individuals) finally caused that the use of fingerprints eventually became preferred over Bertillonage.

From Bertillon's Identification anthropométrique (1893), demonstrating the measurements needed for his anthropometric identification system (Source: Wikipedia.org)

Throughout history there has been the need to record or recognize the identity of individuals. 31,000 year-old cave paintings show “hand-prints” and it is found that Babylonian (500 B.C.) traders recorded their transactions including a fingerprint from the responsible people. Also early Chinese and Egyptian merchants were using ‘biometrics’ for identification purposes.

 

In time, the acknowledgement of uncertainty of metrics due to aging or inaccuracies, drove the identification through biometrics more and more towards those metrics that do not change, such as the iris or fingerprints. The digitalization and associated technology in the 1990’s firstly caused an exponential emergence of the use of iris and fingerprints recognition. Ironically, as you can see in this blog’s earlier posts, the use of biometrics is currently being expanded with those items that Bertillon registered but became obsolete later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Bertillon

http://www.biometrics.gov/documents/biohistory.pdf