Alphonse Bertillon French criminologist, since 1880 he headed the Bureau of Forensic Identification of the Paris Prefecture Date of Birth: 24.04.1853 Country: France

1. Biography of Alphonse Bertillon
2. Early Career as a Clerk
3. Development of Anthropometric Method
4. Initial Resistance and Success
5. Continued Success and Legacy

Biography of Alphonse Bertillon

Alphonse Bertillon was a French criminologist who led the Bureau of Judicial Identification of the Paris Prefecture from 1880. He was the son of respected physician, statistician, and vice-president of the Anthropological Society of Paris, Dr. Louis Adolphe Bertillon, as well as the grandson of naturalist and mathematician Achille Gaidara.

Early Career as a Clerk

Bertillon began his career as a clerk in the First Bureau of the Paris Police Prefecture. His task was to fill out personal description cards for criminals. These descriptions often included generic phrases such as "tall", "short", "average height", "ordinary face", and "no distinctive features". These vague descriptions applied to thousands of individuals. Growing up in a family where he heard the names of Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and other scientists, Bertillon questioned why people wasted time, money, and effort on such unreliable and ineffective methods of identifying criminals. He wondered why anthropometry, the measurement of the human body, could not be used for this purpose.

Development of Anthropometric Method

Bertillon spent months developing the anthropometric method, despite the surprise and ridicule from his fellow clerks. He compared photographs of criminals, examining the shape of their ears and noses. With permission from his superiors, he meticulously measured the arrested individuals. He discovered that while the measurements of individual body parts could be the same between different faces, the measurements of four or five body parts at once were never identical. This became the foundation of his method. The next challenge was to organize the card index system. In his reports to the management, Bertillon argued that the 90,000 different cards should be divided in such a way that any of them could be easily found. By prioritizing head length, which was further divided into large, medium, and small categories, and then introducing head width as the second parameter, the system would result in nine groups of 10,000 cards each. Thus, a card index drawer would contain between three and twelve cards, depending on the eleven data points considered.

Initial Resistance and Success

Initially, Bertillon's superiors did not support his idea. However, through the intervention of his father, a well-known and respected individual, he was allowed to continue his measurements and maintain the card index. He was assigned two clerks who had difficulty understanding the significance of their work and tried to avoid the meticulous and pedantic scrutiny Bertillon imposed on them. The first successful result using his method came almost four years after the idea's inception, just a few days before his trial period ended. On February 20, 1883, he measured a prisoner named Dupont, who turned out to have identical measurements to a card belonging to a man named Martin, who had been arrested several months earlier. On February 21, Paris newspapers published the first articles about the Dupont (Martin) case and the new identification system developed by Bertillon.

Continued Success and Legacy

Over the next three months, Bertillon identified six more individuals using his method. In August and September, he identified fifteen more, and by the end of the year, he had identified twenty-six individuals whom the old methods had failed to identify. By then, the number of registry cards had reached 7,336, and no set of measurements had ever been repeated. In 1884 alone, Bertillon identified 300 people. His method proved to be effective and was adopted in many countries. Bertillon was the first person to introduce scientific methods into criminal investigation. He is credited with inventing and creating card index systems for registering individuals based on their physiological attributes for identification purposes. It was largely the success of his anthropometric method that inspired the first enthusiasts and researchers of fingerprint identification to create a registration system that could identify a specific fingerprint from large collections of fingerprint cards. Fingerprint identification, with its more reliable registration system, eventually replaced the anthropometric method.