November 28, 2011 • 23 mins
In the 19th century, Alphonse Bertillon standardized the mug shot and came up with a system of organizing police records; he also conceived a new way of identifying people. Tune in to learn more about the rise -- and fall -- of Bertillon's system.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm Delina Chok reboarding, and today
we're going to start the podcast by telling you a
story about two men with the last name West. So
(00:24):
in nineteen o three, a guy named will West was
admitted into Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, and as was customary
at the time, his measurements were taken. And that wasn't
just like weight and hide. It was things like the
length and width of his head and measurements of specific fingers.
And while all these measurements were going on, one of
(00:45):
the clerks at the prison had this really strong feeling
that he had measured this guy before, and so he
started to look through records and sure enough, oh, William
West had been admitted to prison and measured just two
years earlier. So it seems like, okay, it's William West again,
He's back in prison. But there was one thing majorly
(01:06):
wrong with this scenario, and that was that William West
was already incarcerated in Leavenworth. So who is the spinky?
So the two Wests were brought into the same room.
They weren't related, but they did look strikingly similar. They
were re measured, and their numbers were also almost identical.
The only easy to document thing that was undoubtedly different
(01:29):
was their fingerprints. So you'll see this story told in
different ways, and it's likely it's just as much a
prison fable as truth. But it's always told for the
same reason to show the fallibility of identification. So what
do we mean that this, Well, for example, your name
certainly doesn't distinguish you, right, Yeah, you can change your name.
There can be another William West or another Dablina out there,
(01:50):
and who's to say you're the person you say you are, right?
But your face doesn't set you apart either. Neither does
the measurement of your left pinky or your cheek. So,
in an era before DNA evidence, the moral of the
West story was that only fingerprints are unique. However, as
the facial and the physical measurements of the two prisoners suggests,
(02:11):
fingerprints weren't always the standard means of identification. They certainly
weren't in the position we think of them now. For
about ten to twenty years, a system of identification and
filing called britonage, So the system seems pretty primitive. Now
we're going to talk about it in detail later in
the podcast, so you'll you'll understand it better. But it
(02:32):
does seem very quaint, very old fashioned, and a whole
lot less elegant than fingerprints. But it was a major
step out of filing chaos that dominated the criminal justice
system in the nineteenth century, and it hasn't been completely
relegated to history either. You are still familiar with certain
(02:52):
aspects of it, whether you know it or not. Every
time you see a celebrity mug shot in TMZ or
just in your local pay for you're looking at a
holdover from the Bertillon system. So before we get too
much into that, though, we're going to have to do
a brief discussion of the criminal justice system and its
(03:12):
development and its problem areas in the nineteenth century. So
as professionals replaced amateurs and investigations, and as evidence began
to sometimes trump witness testimony, and as forensic sciences like
toxicology and forensic pathology developed into distinct areas of study,
a few problems emerged. There was too much information. More
(03:36):
stuff meant more paperwork. So while police would likely be
better able to pinpoint a suspect or identify a repeat
criminal due to the information in their files. I mean
it was like good luck finding that information. So this
was especially problematic as new technologies were adopted before suitable
record keeping methods came along to go with them. Exhibit A. Photography. Yeah,
(03:58):
so the first to get types were produced in eighteen
thirty nine, and a remarkably short amount of time after that.
Just four years later, the first mug shots were taken
in Belgium, but criminal photography didn't exactly take off after that.
To GEARA, types were very privacy, they required in men's
levels of skill, and even later photographic methods still required
(04:21):
really long exposure. So imagine, you know, you're trying to
get this guy who you've just arrested to sit still
for twenty minutes and get your picture taken. It's sometimes
they'd have to resort to actually strapping someone into a
chair to get a non Yes, it's definitely inconvenient. But
(04:42):
pretty much as soon as prices and exposure time started
to drop with photography, it became a common thing in
police stations and it's easy to understand why it's a
useful tool. The head of the Paris Police Detective Division,
Gustav Mussey started to require all photos be take in
and then police stations around the world eventually started to
(05:03):
assemble what we're often called rogues galleries. I think that's
a really cool name. By the way, they were photos
of criminals, supposedly useful for identifying repeat offenders. So there
was one problem with this. The rogues galleries just became huge,
jumbled stockpiles of photos, so foul cabinets filled with images
(05:25):
that were not cataloged in any way. It sounds like
my own photo collection to me too, which is sort
of like the bane of my existence sometimes. But there
was another problem with the photo collections. Besides their tendency
to get out of control, they weren't necessarily accurate. Photos
could be taken in a different light, at different exposures
and at different distances, and so they would look remarkably different.
(05:48):
I mean, just imagine taking a photo with the professional
camera and comparing it to the same image taken with
your camera phone. I mean, every everybody is familiar with
the differences that could be perceived in photos, and so
early much shots that that's the big problem with them.
They weren't standardized a photo at a different exposure, different lighting,
(06:09):
or something is not going to necessarily be recognizable as
the same guy. Criminals were even photographed with hats sometimes
or hair obscuring their features, and even if the photos
were standardized, it didn't mean that the subject couldn't still
dramatically transform his or her appearance with hair coloring, facial
hair disguise as you name it, or just get older
(06:30):
and start to look different. There's a two thousand nine
Economist article on human identity which I thought was really
interesting and mentioned a unique problem in the nineteenth century,
and that was the traveling criminal facilitated by railways. And
this is kind of simplifying things, but you can't imagine
a time when criminals were more local and a local
(06:51):
police force would know who to keep an eye on.
But with somebody who could dramatically change their identity and
skip town on the next train, police needed a way
to recognize Recdavis criminals they had never seen before, and clearly, photos,
while useful in a certain respect, weren't the way to
do it. Yeah, neither was branding, which I guess was
(07:13):
done in the old school way of recognizing repeat offenders.
So enter Alphonse Bertillon, who in eighteen seventy nine, at
age twenty six, had just gotten a job as a
clerk in the Paris police department. Bertien was from an
incredibly illustrious family. His father, Louis, was a famous medical
professor and a statistician. His older brother, Jacques, also became
(07:34):
a noted statistician and a demographer. He had grown up
in an environment of intellectual stimulation, hearing dinner table talk
about men like Lambert Adolphe Jacques Qutola, a statistician who
theorized no two people were alike. But Alfonse was less illustrious.
He got kicked out of several schools for poor grades.
According to the Science of Sherlock Holmes by E. J. Wagner,
(07:58):
he was incredibly awkward. He hardly ever spoke, He was
very grumpy and obsessively organized. He was also quite sickly.
He had nose bleeds, digestive issues, and headaches, which are
not the kind of physical complaints that probably make you
very popular on the police force either. So uh Alfonse
was unable to hold down a job, and he started
(08:20):
his clerk position with the Paris police due to his
father's influence. But really early on in the job. He
realized the department's filing system was dismissed. They had that
rogues gallery thing going on, and they needed a way
to recognize and identify repeat criminals. So the organized data
of Saspertion cooked up a system just a few months
(08:42):
later and presented a report to his superiors about the
use of some sort of standardized physical and facial measurement system.
But the report wasn't written with the proper bureaucratic deference,
I guess, and it got tossed out pretty much immediately. However,
Bertillon's father, this influential guy, realized that there was something
(09:03):
to his son's idea and kept pressuring the police department
to review it again. They stalled as long as they could,
and then finally in two they consented and Bertillon was
given some money, given two assistance, and set on the
task to make this work, make this system something the
(09:23):
department could really put to good use. So Bertillon called
this idea anthropometry. It's also become known as the Bertillon
system or Bear teenage. As Sarah mentioned earlier, it focused
on eleven separate measurements that Bartien believed shouldn't change after
age twenty. These were the following the total length of
the arms, sitting height, standing height, the length of the head,
(09:46):
the width of the head, the width of the cheeks,
the length of the right ear, the length of the
left foot, the length of the little finger, the length
of the left middle finger, and the length of each
arm from elbow to tip of middle finger, which was
something called the cubit. So he would use calipers, sliding
compasses and these other carefully calibrated instruments and do three
(10:09):
of every single one of those measurements, and then take
the mean from those three, and then these numbers were
all entered on a card that featured a standardized mugshot.
And this is the mug shot that you know today.
It's lit the same way, taken full on, taken in profile.
And the photo was also accompanied by some information, some
stuff that might be familiar from your driver's license or
(10:32):
from wanted posters. It was called a portray parlay, and
it would list eye and hair color, complexion scars or tattoos,
head shape, um, the person's building, their posture, and then
some more unusual details like accent and voice and dress
style if the dress style was particularly unusual, and busy
(10:55):
detectives of course didn't feel like they could enter all
of this stuff all the time, so they slimmed it
down a bit to the more standard things like eye color,
hair color. But if you look at one of these cards,
these Bertillon cards, it's filled with facts and measurements and
that very recognizable modern mug shot. I mean it looks,
(11:17):
it looks kind of what you still see today, like
what you see today. And after all that information was collected,
then the real work began. Every card was cross referenced
so that if a policeman were looking for a suspect
or trying to determine if someone in custody had a
criminal history, they could check for specific physical measurements pulling
cards that were possibilities. Within a year of its adoption,
(11:39):
Barton used his system to identify two forty one repeat criminals,
and the system soon spread from France to much of
Europe and the United States. Bartien was made the director
of the Police Identification Service and even earned himself the
approval of Sherlock Holmes in eightee when Arthur Conan Doyle,
one of our favorite podcast subjects, had Watson say of
(12:01):
Sherlock in the story the Naval Treaty. Quote his conversation
I remember, was about the Bertillon system of measurements, and
he expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant. So, yeah,
that is high praise if Sherlock Holmes likes what you're doing. So,
of course, though Barton system relied on the assumption that
my elbow to middle finger length and my head width
(12:24):
and cheek width and all of those other measurements couldn't
possibly be the same as someone else's. Unfortunately, they could
be pretty similar, and subtle differences between people could be
a race by one sloppy measurement, even if you had
a technician who was trying to do a good job,
not purposely trying to manipulate the system. If you've ever
(12:46):
measured anything, you know it's kind of easy to mess
up sometimes. So that led to a second major problem.
It was a lot of work to take all this
information down and let alone file at all. The documentation
the filing were both really complex. The measurements required high
quality instruments, a lot of concentration, a lot of skill,
(13:06):
and even then countries differed in their measuring system, so
this was not an international system. Even though countries around
the world had adopted it. So around the height of
Berton's fame, an anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin
named Sir Francis Galton read a report in Nature by
Henry Folds about fingerprints and Galton started getting really interested
(13:31):
in prints after that, started studying them and determined that
they were unique to every person and that kind of
maybe even more importantly, they don't change, even though almost
everything about us can change or does change, whether it's
limb length and you're growing or you're shrinking as you're
getting older, hair, colored teeth, even eye color can change.
But your fingerprints don't. So Galton wrote a report in
(13:57):
book called Fingerprints, and he presented his findings that fingerprints
had these distinguishing characteristics like whirls and loops and points,
and he also presented a system of using them, and
the system went into effect pretty quickly, although independently of
of Galton's work. Meanwhile, Juan Vusage of the Laplata police
(14:19):
and Argentina was also developing a system of print identification
that was used to find a mother guilty of murdering
her two children. Yeah, that was probably the first of
the bloody thumb prints. You know, like ubiquitous and all
crime movies used to identify people. But fingerprinting really caught
on from there, and well, Virtione resisted as long as
(14:41):
he could, saying his system was better, it was more reliable.
He did eventually add fingerprinting to his cards as just
another measurement, you know, one of all the other head
shapes and arm lengths and all of that. So while
the will West William West case in three is often
used as kind of an illustrative example of the death
(15:02):
knell of the Beartien system and the rise of fingerprints,
a slightly later story kind of does the job a
little bit better. In August nineteen eleven, the Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Louver, and I know that a
lot of people always bring this up as a listeners suggestion.
The police it produced a thumb print from the thief,
and Barton's identification department got to work checking their files
(15:22):
to see if the thief had a criminal history in France.
They didn't find a match, though, so two years go
by and Vincenzo Perugia was found hiding the Masterpiece under
his bed. Once his background is investigated, it turned out
that he did have a file in France, So what happened?
Why didn't they find him with their great organizational systems.
(15:43):
So it turned out that Barton, even though he had
reluctantly adopted the fingerprinting system, had only filed away right
thumb prints for criminals, and Perugia had unfortunately left hey
left thumb print at the loop, which did do much
good at all. So, as we said, that was kind
of the death knell of bartonage, even in Paris where
(16:08):
it had sort of held on a little longer than
most places. Fingerprints became the norm in identification until the
nineteen eighties when DNA evidence started to take over and
Bertill died February nineteen fourteen in Switzerland. But I don't
want to leave off in this episode like he should
be some sort of historical footnote just because in can
(16:30):
paper replace calipers and sliding rulers. He really did have
a pretty major influence on forensic science and on cataloging things. Yeah,
he also worked with ballistics research compounds that could preserve
footprints or other impressions, instruments that could measure the force
used in breaking and entering and handwriting analysis, which also
(16:52):
got him into a little bit of trouble when he
helped wrongfully accused Captain Alfred Dreyfuss of sharing French military secret.
That's an interesting story, y'all can go check out that,
oh in yourself too. It could make an interesting podcast too,
come to think of it. As we mentioned, Virton's photography
contribution is really the big part of his legacy. He
(17:13):
did develop that standardized mug shot, you know, front profile,
same distance, same kind of lighting, still used today. That
he also took the camera to the crime scene itself
and attempted to remove the sources of air and manipulation
that can come up with crime scene photography. For instance,
he would shoot a scene from above on a high
(17:35):
mounted tripod before investigators could touch anything. And I looked
at a few examples of his photos like this, and
they're they're disturbing. It's kind of like you're looking in
on like bird's eye view, looking in almost like a
doll house or something, and it gives an eerie effect
to the crime. But it also gives a perfect layout
(17:58):
of the room, which is something that can be cult
to achieve when you're shooting from the ground. And he
also used something called metric photography, which helped document perspective
and the relation of objects to one another, which again
is something really important in crime theme photography because that
can be manipulated, whether on purpose or accidentally, so easily.
And another one of his vital contributions which we can't
(18:20):
leave out, One of his students was Edmund's Lackard, who
you might know from Lackard's exchange principle, a basic tenant
of forensic science that states, quote, with contact between two items,
there will be an exchange. Yeah, and that's the principle
that investigators still operate under today. As Lacard put it,
it is impossible for a criminal to act, especially considering
(18:41):
the intensity of a crime, without leaving traces of his presence. Basically,
if you are at a crime scene, you'll leave something behind,
whether it's hair or fingerprints or skin, and you will
take something with you two that could later be identified
by the police. And it's an idea that I think
of tales really nicely with a belief of Bertillons, which
(19:03):
is careful, observation and patience will reveal the truth. So, um,
just some some things to think about, and I really
enjoyed doing a little forensic science history today I've kind
of got criminal justice on my mind, so maybe we'll
have a few more of these come up. Who knows. Yeah,
And people can go check out some more information about
(19:24):
Bertien right. The National Library of Medicine has a great
collection of information on Bartien and early forensic history, and
you can see Artien cards and catalogs of ear shapes.
I actually I put one of the Bertillon cards on
our outlines that we can look at it, and it's
a photo of Vertillon himself in that classic mug shop pose.
He's got quite an interesting pointy beard, and then all
(19:47):
of those measurements listed to it really gives you an
idea of seeing one of the cards, how detailed it is,
and that ear shaped thing definitely checked that out. It's
pretty pretty entertaining. Who knew there were so many different ears?
So I think that's probably the perfect time to go
to listener mail m hm. So this email is from
(20:10):
Stephen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he wrote in high Sarada Bolina,
I love your podcast. I wanted to comment on your
recent episode on Admiral Ye Sunston. You mentioned that E's
family had wanted him to pursue a literary career. Instead
of a military one, then jokingly wondered why a family
would do so because we're English major, so you know
(20:31):
it's a it's a joke. Prease too. Um. Stephen continues,
it is true that in our modern technological society, where
the safe and secure jobs are in science and engineering,
and where humanities majors struggle to find work, this was
not always the case. In confusion societies like China and Korea,
young men who had the means always studied literature and
philosophy to prepare for the kings or emperor's civil service examination.
(20:55):
For thousands of years, these governments carefully selected their officials
from among the scholar who passed these exams. Thus, a
literary career was generally the surest way to gain power
and membership in the aristocratic elite. In fact, sometimes a
poor village would gather their resources to put a promising
young boy through school in the hopes that if he
one day became a high ranking official, he would repay
(21:18):
the village with favors. So yeah, I thought that was
um a good point to add to our episode on
Admiral Yee and and helped give me a little context
for for understanding why his decision was sort of a
unique one. Yeah, I feel like you need to forward
this email to my parents to justify my major in
(21:41):
English as well. Yeah, well, and I mean it is
we've kind of unwittingly taken that path too, I guess
ourselves though, studying something like literature and ending up in
what is obviously a tech jail. We work for a website. Sorry, sure,
do you never know what's going to happen. So thank
you Stephen for telling us a little more or about
Admiral he And if you want to suggest any more
(22:04):
sort of forensic science or criminal history type episodes, um,
you know, like maybe the police side of things, since
we're usually talking about the criminal side. Uh, definitely let
us know. We are at history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also on Twitter at missed in History,
and we're on Facebook. And if you want to learn
(22:24):
a little bit more about some of the ideas that
we talked about today, we have an article called how
lockers exchange principle works and you can find it by
searching for that on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
(22:47):
possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm Delina Chok reboarding, and today
we're going to start the podcast by telling you a
story about two men with the last name West. So
(00:24):
in nineteen o three, a guy named will West was
admitted into Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, and as was customary
at the time, his measurements were taken. And that wasn't
just like weight and hide. It was things like the
length and width of his head and measurements of specific fingers.
And while all these measurements were going on, one of
(00:45):
the clerks at the prison had this really strong feeling
that he had measured this guy before, and so he
started to look through records and sure enough, oh, William
West had been admitted to prison and measured just two
years earlier. So it seems like, okay, it's William West again,
He's back in prison. But there was one thing majorly
(01:06):
wrong with this scenario, and that was that William West
was already incarcerated in Leavenworth. So who is the spinky?
So the two Wests were brought into the same room.
They weren't related, but they did look strikingly similar. They
were re measured, and their numbers were also almost identical.
The only easy to document thing that was undoubtedly different
(01:29):
was their fingerprints. So you'll see this story told in
different ways, and it's likely it's just as much a
prison fable as truth. But it's always told for the
same reason to show the fallibility of identification. So what
do we mean that this, Well, for example, your name
certainly doesn't distinguish you, right, Yeah, you can change your name.
There can be another William West or another Dablina out there,
(01:50):
and who's to say you're the person you say you are, right?
But your face doesn't set you apart either. Neither does
the measurement of your left pinky or your cheek. So,
in an era before DNA evidence, the moral of the
West story was that only fingerprints are unique. However, as
the facial and the physical measurements of the two prisoners suggests,
(02:11):
fingerprints weren't always the standard means of identification. They certainly
weren't in the position we think of them now. For
about ten to twenty years, a system of identification and
filing called britonage, So the system seems pretty primitive. Now
we're going to talk about it in detail later in
the podcast, so you'll you'll understand it better. But it
(02:32):
does seem very quaint, very old fashioned, and a whole
lot less elegant than fingerprints. But it was a major
step out of filing chaos that dominated the criminal justice
system in the nineteenth century, and it hasn't been completely
relegated to history either. You are still familiar with certain
(02:52):
aspects of it, whether you know it or not. Every
time you see a celebrity mug shot in TMZ or
just in your local pay for you're looking at a
holdover from the Bertillon system. So before we get too
much into that, though, we're going to have to do
a brief discussion of the criminal justice system and its
(03:12):
development and its problem areas in the nineteenth century. So
as professionals replaced amateurs and investigations, and as evidence began
to sometimes trump witness testimony, and as forensic sciences like
toxicology and forensic pathology developed into distinct areas of study,
a few problems emerged. There was too much information. More
(03:36):
stuff meant more paperwork. So while police would likely be
better able to pinpoint a suspect or identify a repeat
criminal due to the information in their files. I mean
it was like good luck finding that information. So this
was especially problematic as new technologies were adopted before suitable
record keeping methods came along to go with them. Exhibit A. Photography. Yeah,
(03:58):
so the first to get types were produced in eighteen
thirty nine, and a remarkably short amount of time after that.
Just four years later, the first mug shots were taken
in Belgium, but criminal photography didn't exactly take off after that.
To GEARA, types were very privacy, they required in men's
levels of skill, and even later photographic methods still required
(04:21):
really long exposure. So imagine, you know, you're trying to
get this guy who you've just arrested to sit still
for twenty minutes and get your picture taken. It's sometimes
they'd have to resort to actually strapping someone into a
chair to get a non Yes, it's definitely inconvenient. But
(04:42):
pretty much as soon as prices and exposure time started
to drop with photography, it became a common thing in
police stations and it's easy to understand why it's a
useful tool. The head of the Paris Police Detective Division,
Gustav Mussey started to require all photos be take in
and then police stations around the world eventually started to
(05:03):
assemble what we're often called rogues galleries. I think that's
a really cool name. By the way, they were photos
of criminals, supposedly useful for identifying repeat offenders. So there
was one problem with this. The rogues galleries just became huge,
jumbled stockpiles of photos, so foul cabinets filled with images
(05:25):
that were not cataloged in any way. It sounds like
my own photo collection to me too, which is sort
of like the bane of my existence sometimes. But there
was another problem with the photo collections. Besides their tendency
to get out of control, they weren't necessarily accurate. Photos
could be taken in a different light, at different exposures
and at different distances, and so they would look remarkably different.
(05:48):
I mean, just imagine taking a photo with the professional
camera and comparing it to the same image taken with
your camera phone. I mean, every everybody is familiar with
the differences that could be perceived in photos, and so
early much shots that that's the big problem with them.
They weren't standardized a photo at a different exposure, different lighting,
(06:09):
or something is not going to necessarily be recognizable as
the same guy. Criminals were even photographed with hats sometimes
or hair obscuring their features, and even if the photos
were standardized, it didn't mean that the subject couldn't still
dramatically transform his or her appearance with hair coloring, facial
hair disguise as you name it, or just get older
(06:30):
and start to look different. There's a two thousand nine
Economist article on human identity which I thought was really
interesting and mentioned a unique problem in the nineteenth century,
and that was the traveling criminal facilitated by railways. And
this is kind of simplifying things, but you can't imagine
a time when criminals were more local and a local
(06:51):
police force would know who to keep an eye on.
But with somebody who could dramatically change their identity and
skip town on the next train, police needed a way
to recognize Recdavis criminals they had never seen before, and clearly, photos,
while useful in a certain respect, weren't the way to
do it. Yeah, neither was branding, which I guess was
(07:13):
done in the old school way of recognizing repeat offenders.
So enter Alphonse Bertillon, who in eighteen seventy nine, at
age twenty six, had just gotten a job as a
clerk in the Paris police department. Bertien was from an
incredibly illustrious family. His father, Louis, was a famous medical
professor and a statistician. His older brother, Jacques, also became
(07:34):
a noted statistician and a demographer. He had grown up
in an environment of intellectual stimulation, hearing dinner table talk
about men like Lambert Adolphe Jacques Qutola, a statistician who
theorized no two people were alike. But Alfonse was less illustrious.
He got kicked out of several schools for poor grades.
According to the Science of Sherlock Holmes by E. J. Wagner,
(07:58):
he was incredibly awkward. He hardly ever spoke, He was
very grumpy and obsessively organized. He was also quite sickly.
He had nose bleeds, digestive issues, and headaches, which are
not the kind of physical complaints that probably make you
very popular on the police force either. So uh Alfonse
was unable to hold down a job, and he started
(08:20):
his clerk position with the Paris police due to his
father's influence. But really early on in the job. He
realized the department's filing system was dismissed. They had that
rogues gallery thing going on, and they needed a way
to recognize and identify repeat criminals. So the organized data
of Saspertion cooked up a system just a few months
(08:42):
later and presented a report to his superiors about the
use of some sort of standardized physical and facial measurement system.
But the report wasn't written with the proper bureaucratic deference,
I guess, and it got tossed out pretty much immediately. However,
Bertillon's father, this influential guy, realized that there was something
(09:03):
to his son's idea and kept pressuring the police department
to review it again. They stalled as long as they could,
and then finally in two they consented and Bertillon was
given some money, given two assistance, and set on the
task to make this work, make this system something the
(09:23):
department could really put to good use. So Bertillon called
this idea anthropometry. It's also become known as the Bertillon
system or Bear teenage. As Sarah mentioned earlier, it focused
on eleven separate measurements that Bartien believed shouldn't change after
age twenty. These were the following the total length of
the arms, sitting height, standing height, the length of the head,
(09:46):
the width of the head, the width of the cheeks,
the length of the right ear, the length of the
left foot, the length of the little finger, the length
of the left middle finger, and the length of each
arm from elbow to tip of middle finger, which was
something called the cubit. So he would use calipers, sliding
compasses and these other carefully calibrated instruments and do three
(10:09):
of every single one of those measurements, and then take
the mean from those three, and then these numbers were
all entered on a card that featured a standardized mugshot.
And this is the mug shot that you know today.
It's lit the same way, taken full on, taken in profile.
And the photo was also accompanied by some information, some
stuff that might be familiar from your driver's license or
(10:32):
from wanted posters. It was called a portray parlay, and
it would list eye and hair color, complexion scars or tattoos,
head shape, um, the person's building, their posture, and then
some more unusual details like accent and voice and dress
style if the dress style was particularly unusual, and busy
(10:55):
detectives of course didn't feel like they could enter all
of this stuff all the time, so they slimmed it
down a bit to the more standard things like eye color,
hair color. But if you look at one of these cards,
these Bertillon cards, it's filled with facts and measurements and
that very recognizable modern mug shot. I mean it looks,
(11:17):
it looks kind of what you still see today, like
what you see today. And after all that information was collected,
then the real work began. Every card was cross referenced
so that if a policeman were looking for a suspect
or trying to determine if someone in custody had a
criminal history, they could check for specific physical measurements pulling
cards that were possibilities. Within a year of its adoption,
(11:39):
Barton used his system to identify two forty one repeat criminals,
and the system soon spread from France to much of
Europe and the United States. Bartien was made the director
of the Police Identification Service and even earned himself the
approval of Sherlock Holmes in eightee when Arthur Conan Doyle,
one of our favorite podcast subjects, had Watson say of
(12:01):
Sherlock in the story the Naval Treaty. Quote his conversation
I remember, was about the Bertillon system of measurements, and
he expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant. So, yeah,
that is high praise if Sherlock Holmes likes what you're doing. So,
of course, though Barton system relied on the assumption that
my elbow to middle finger length and my head width
(12:24):
and cheek width and all of those other measurements couldn't
possibly be the same as someone else's. Unfortunately, they could
be pretty similar, and subtle differences between people could be
a race by one sloppy measurement, even if you had
a technician who was trying to do a good job,
not purposely trying to manipulate the system. If you've ever
(12:46):
measured anything, you know it's kind of easy to mess
up sometimes. So that led to a second major problem.
It was a lot of work to take all this
information down and let alone file at all. The documentation
the filing were both really complex. The measurements required high
quality instruments, a lot of concentration, a lot of skill,
(13:06):
and even then countries differed in their measuring system, so
this was not an international system. Even though countries around
the world had adopted it. So around the height of
Berton's fame, an anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin
named Sir Francis Galton read a report in Nature by
Henry Folds about fingerprints and Galton started getting really interested
(13:31):
in prints after that, started studying them and determined that
they were unique to every person and that kind of
maybe even more importantly, they don't change, even though almost
everything about us can change or does change, whether it's
limb length and you're growing or you're shrinking as you're
getting older, hair, colored teeth, even eye color can change.
But your fingerprints don't. So Galton wrote a report in
(13:57):
book called Fingerprints, and he presented his findings that fingerprints
had these distinguishing characteristics like whirls and loops and points,
and he also presented a system of using them, and
the system went into effect pretty quickly, although independently of
of Galton's work. Meanwhile, Juan Vusage of the Laplata police
(14:19):
and Argentina was also developing a system of print identification
that was used to find a mother guilty of murdering
her two children. Yeah, that was probably the first of
the bloody thumb prints. You know, like ubiquitous and all
crime movies used to identify people. But fingerprinting really caught
on from there, and well, Virtione resisted as long as
(14:41):
he could, saying his system was better, it was more reliable.
He did eventually add fingerprinting to his cards as just
another measurement, you know, one of all the other head
shapes and arm lengths and all of that. So while
the will West William West case in three is often
used as kind of an illustrative example of the death
(15:02):
knell of the Beartien system and the rise of fingerprints,
a slightly later story kind of does the job a
little bit better. In August nineteen eleven, the Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Louver, and I know that a
lot of people always bring this up as a listeners suggestion.
The police it produced a thumb print from the thief,
and Barton's identification department got to work checking their files
(15:22):
to see if the thief had a criminal history in France.
They didn't find a match, though, so two years go
by and Vincenzo Perugia was found hiding the Masterpiece under
his bed. Once his background is investigated, it turned out
that he did have a file in France, So what happened?
Why didn't they find him with their great organizational systems.
(15:43):
So it turned out that Barton, even though he had
reluctantly adopted the fingerprinting system, had only filed away right
thumb prints for criminals, and Perugia had unfortunately left hey
left thumb print at the loop, which did do much
good at all. So, as we said, that was kind
of the death knell of bartonage, even in Paris where
(16:08):
it had sort of held on a little longer than
most places. Fingerprints became the norm in identification until the
nineteen eighties when DNA evidence started to take over and
Bertill died February nineteen fourteen in Switzerland. But I don't
want to leave off in this episode like he should
be some sort of historical footnote just because in can
(16:30):
paper replace calipers and sliding rulers. He really did have
a pretty major influence on forensic science and on cataloging things. Yeah,
he also worked with ballistics research compounds that could preserve
footprints or other impressions, instruments that could measure the force
used in breaking and entering and handwriting analysis, which also
(16:52):
got him into a little bit of trouble when he
helped wrongfully accused Captain Alfred Dreyfuss of sharing French military secret.
That's an interesting story, y'all can go check out that,
oh in yourself too. It could make an interesting podcast too,
come to think of it. As we mentioned, Virton's photography
contribution is really the big part of his legacy. He
(17:13):
did develop that standardized mug shot, you know, front profile,
same distance, same kind of lighting, still used today. That
he also took the camera to the crime scene itself
and attempted to remove the sources of air and manipulation
that can come up with crime scene photography. For instance,
he would shoot a scene from above on a high
(17:35):
mounted tripod before investigators could touch anything. And I looked
at a few examples of his photos like this, and
they're they're disturbing. It's kind of like you're looking in
on like bird's eye view, looking in almost like a
doll house or something, and it gives an eerie effect
to the crime. But it also gives a perfect layout
(17:58):
of the room, which is something that can be cult
to achieve when you're shooting from the ground. And he
also used something called metric photography, which helped document perspective
and the relation of objects to one another, which again
is something really important in crime theme photography because that
can be manipulated, whether on purpose or accidentally, so easily.
And another one of his vital contributions which we can't
(18:20):
leave out, One of his students was Edmund's Lackard, who
you might know from Lackard's exchange principle, a basic tenant
of forensic science that states, quote, with contact between two items,
there will be an exchange. Yeah, and that's the principle
that investigators still operate under today. As Lacard put it,
it is impossible for a criminal to act, especially considering
(18:41):
the intensity of a crime, without leaving traces of his presence. Basically,
if you are at a crime scene, you'll leave something behind,
whether it's hair or fingerprints or skin, and you will
take something with you two that could later be identified
by the police. And it's an idea that I think
of tales really nicely with a belief of Bertillons, which
(19:03):
is careful, observation and patience will reveal the truth. So, um,
just some some things to think about, and I really
enjoyed doing a little forensic science history today I've kind
of got criminal justice on my mind, so maybe we'll
have a few more of these come up. Who knows. Yeah,
And people can go check out some more information about
(19:24):
Bertien right. The National Library of Medicine has a great
collection of information on Bartien and early forensic history, and
you can see Artien cards and catalogs of ear shapes.
I actually I put one of the Bertillon cards on
our outlines that we can look at it, and it's
a photo of Vertillon himself in that classic mug shop pose.
He's got quite an interesting pointy beard, and then all
(19:47):
of those measurements listed to it really gives you an
idea of seeing one of the cards, how detailed it is,
and that ear shaped thing definitely checked that out. It's
pretty pretty entertaining. Who knew there were so many different ears?
So I think that's probably the perfect time to go
to listener mail m hm. So this email is from
(20:10):
Stephen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he wrote in high Sarada Bolina,
I love your podcast. I wanted to comment on your
recent episode on Admiral Ye Sunston. You mentioned that E's
family had wanted him to pursue a literary career. Instead
of a military one, then jokingly wondered why a family
would do so because we're English major, so you know
(20:31):
it's a it's a joke. Prease too. Um. Stephen continues,
it is true that in our modern technological society, where
the safe and secure jobs are in science and engineering,
and where humanities majors struggle to find work, this was
not always the case. In confusion societies like China and Korea,
young men who had the means always studied literature and
philosophy to prepare for the kings or emperor's civil service examination.
(20:55):
For thousands of years, these governments carefully selected their officials
from among the scholar who passed these exams. Thus, a
literary career was generally the surest way to gain power
and membership in the aristocratic elite. In fact, sometimes a
poor village would gather their resources to put a promising
young boy through school in the hopes that if he
one day became a high ranking official, he would repay
(21:18):
the village with favors. So yeah, I thought that was
um a good point to add to our episode on
Admiral Yee and and helped give me a little context
for for understanding why his decision was sort of a
unique one. Yeah, I feel like you need to forward
this email to my parents to justify my major in
(21:41):
English as well. Yeah, well, and I mean it is
we've kind of unwittingly taken that path too, I guess
ourselves though, studying something like literature and ending up in
what is obviously a tech jail. We work for a website. Sorry, sure,
do you never know what's going to happen. So thank
you Stephen for telling us a little more or about
Admiral he And if you want to suggest any more
(22:04):
sort of forensic science or criminal history type episodes, um,
you know, like maybe the police side of things, since
we're usually talking about the criminal side. Uh, definitely let
us know. We are at history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also on Twitter at missed in History,
and we're on Facebook. And if you want to learn
(22:24):
a little bit more about some of the ideas that
we talked about today, we have an article called how
lockers exchange principle works and you can find it by
searching for that on our homepage at www dot how
stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our
new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff
Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
(22:47):
possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has
a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
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