Alphonse Bertillon

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Alphonse Bertillon

Illustration from "The Speaking Portrait" (Pearson's Magazine, Vol XI, January to June 1901) demonstrating the principles of Bertillon's anthropometry.

Alphonse Bertillon (April 23, 1853–February 13, 1914) was a French law enforcement officer and biometrics researcher, who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system police used to identify criminals. Until this time, criminals could only be identified based on eyewitness accounts, which are known to be unreliable. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting.^[1]

Alphonse Bertillon was born April 23, 1853 in Paris. He was a son of statistician Louis Bertillon and younger brother of the statistician and demographer Jacques Bertillon.

Bertillon began as a records clerk in a police department. Paradoxically he got this job as a protegé of his prominent father. Being an orderly man, he was dissatisfied with the ad hoc methods used to identify captured criminals who had been arrested before. This motivated his invention of anthropometrics. Bertillon's road to fame was a protracted and hard one as he was forced to do his measurements in his spare-time. He used the famous La Santé prison in Paris for his activities facing jeers from the prison inmates as well as police officers.

Frontisepiece from Bertillon'sIdentification anthropométrique (1893), demonstrating the measurements one takes for his anthropometric identification system.

In 1882 Bertillon presented a criminal identification system known as anthropometry but later also known as bertillonage in honor of its creator. In this system the person was identified by body measurement of the head and body, individual markings - tattoos, scars - and personality characteristics. The measurements were made into a formula that would apply only on one person and would not change. He used it in 1884 to identify 241 multiple offenders, and the system was quickly adopted widely by American and British police forces. Part of its benefit was that by arranging the records carefully, it would be very easy to sift through a large number of records quickly given a few measurements from the person to be identified. While it might not always give an exact match, it would allow one to narrow the pool of possible people and then to compare the person with a photograph.

The system was eventually found to be flawed, however, because often two different officers made their measurements in slightly different ways and would not obtain the same numbers. Measurements could also change as the criminal aged. It also could identify two individuals as the same person, unlike fingerprinting. In 1903, the system was discredited when a man named Will West arrested in Kansas was found to be a previously arrested man with anthropometrics, but fingerprinting contradicted this.

The system was widely used by French police and in other European countries. In France it was popular enough that it was widely used even after the advent of fingerprinting. One audacious member of the Bonnot gang sent police his fingerprints because he knew they did not have them, just his physical measurements.

Bertillon was a witness for the prosecution in the Dreyfus Affair in 1899. He testified as a handwriting expert, although he had had no experience in that area and claimed that Alfred Dreyfus had written the incriminating documents.

Bertillon also standardized the criminal mug shot and the evidence picture. He developed "metric photography" that he intended to use to reconstruct the dimension of a particular space and the placement of objects in it. Crime scene pictures were taken before the scene was disturbed in any way. He used mats printed with metric frames that were mounted along the side of the photographs. Photographs pictured front and side views of a particular object.

Bertillon also created many other forensics techniques, including handwriting analysis, the use of galvanoplastic compounds to preserve footprints, ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering.

Alphonse Bertillon died February 13, 1914 in Münsterlingen, Switzerland.