A Short History of Biometrics

Until the late 19^th century, Biometrics didn’t appear in Western culture. But the advent of biometrics to identify an individual was established long before Western Cultures had any ideas about biometrics. The earliest recorded use of biometrics for identification occurred during the fourteenth century.

Joao de Barros, and explorer and writer, wrote that Chinese merchants stamped children’s palm prints and footprints on paper with ink. He writes that they did this as a way of identifying one child from another.

Identification of a person using their physical traits has been around for centuries. Even before the advent of photography, a good sketch artist could make a likeness of one’s features, usually if they were a criminal, and send it to others who could then use it to identify the criminal who had migrated to a different town. 

Identification in the West relied heavily on “photographic memory” for many years before Alphonse Bertillon, a French police desk clerk and anthropologist, developed an anthropometric system (system of measuring human physical traits such as strength, size, reach, and mobility) of identification in 1881. The first precise scientific system widely used to identify criminals, the anthropometric system turned biometrics into a field of study.

Through accurately recording individual markings such as tattoos, scars, and birthmark, and by measuring certain lengths and widths of the head and body, this anthropometric system was widely adopted in the West for many years. It began to lose momentum as a science when the flaws in Bertillon’s system became apparent. These problems stemmed from differing methods of measurement and the fact that individuals change and thus their measurements and identifying marks may disappear or change as well.