Silent Witnesses Read Online Free PDF Page B

widely different locations within a short space of time, and with no system to keep track of them, they were at complete liberty to do so.
    It was the French scientist Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) who took the first major steps toward solving this problem, though he arguably would not have done so were it not for the influence of several important figures. The first of these was the Belgian astronomer Lambert Quetelet, seen by many as the father of modern statistics. In his 1835 book
Sur L’Homme et le développement de ses facultés
(published in English in 1842 as
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties),
he attempted to apply the statistical method to the development of human physical and intellectual faculties—in layman’s terms, he wanted to know what made people tick. Alphonse’s father, Louis-Adolphe, then a young medical student, was fascinated by Quetelet’s ideas on “social physics.” During the 1848 Revolution in France, he found himself in prison for six months with one of his professors, Achille Guillard, who was also interested in this field. (Guillard, who was considered a dangerous liberal, also invented and developed demography, the study of regional groups and races.) The two must have got on well because shortly afterwards Louis-Adolphe married Guillard’s daughter Zoe. Guillard and Louis-Adolphe went on to found the School of Anthropology in Paris and in doing so formalized a new science. There can be little doubt that the indirect influence of Quetelet and Guillard and the direct influence of his father shaped Bertillon’s work.
    That said, Bertillon did not get off to a promising start in life; he was a rebellious child, often referred to as
l’enfant terrible.
He was thrown out of schools and his German tutor resignedin disgust. The death of his mother in 1866 only caused his behavior to deteriorate further. As an adult he drifted through life, working first as a teacher in England, then joining the army, and finally settling down as a clerk in the department of the Prefecture of Police (thanks almost solely to his father’s influence). The work, however, was repetitive and boring and almost drove Bertillon out of his mind. To alleviate this boredom, he began to apply himself to the problem of identification. He quickly realized that most of the techniques being used by the police were at best defective and at worst totally useless—there was no proper system in place to facilitate efficient identification. Bertillon took his inspiration from Quetelet’s
Anthropometry, or the Measurement of Different Faculties in Man
(1871), reasoning that if human faculties could be measured and recorded, surely physical characteristics could as well.
    He began to work on a system of identification that today we would refer to as “photo-fit pictures.” He cut up photographs and stuck the pieces to sections of cardboard so that they could be arranged together in different combinations of component parts (ears, eyes, noses, mouths, etc.) to create new faces. Using them, a witness could construct a rough likeness of a person they had seen. A refined version of this system is still used to this day as a method to identify people.
    At first Bertillon’s system convinced few people but, despite lack of support from his colleagues, he persisted. Thanks to Quetelet’s work, and that of his own father, he knew that human characteristics tend to fall into statistical groups. And he knew —as all French hatmakers and tailors had known for years—that no two human beings have all the same measurements. He realized that if he could devise a quick and simple system of measuringvarious parts of a criminal’s anatomy (such as the circumference of their head and the length of their arms, legs, and fingers), he could then match these measurements against any individual that came through his door. Through doing so, he would quickly